Research Bio

Ian Duncan's recent book, Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (2019), considers the interaction of the European novel and the "natural history of man" from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century: a period in which the ascendancy of realism coincided with the rise of evolutionary science and a new, developmental conception of human nature. Chapters consider the formation of late-Enlightenment philosophical anthropology (Buffon, Rousseau, Kant, Herder), the new genres of Romantic Bildungsroman and historical novel (Goethe, Stael, Scott), Lamarckian historical romance circa 1830 (Scott, Hugo), Dickens's pre-Darwinian transformist experiments, and George Eliot's engagement with the Victorian revolutions in the human and natural sciences.

Duncan is currently writing a short book on Scotland and Romanticism; a series of essays on Walter Scott, the historical novel, sovereignty and empire; and essays on Charles Darwin and nineteenth-century culture. He is editing The Cambridge History of Scottish Literature and The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott (both Cambridge University Press).

Research Expertise and Interest

English, the novel, British literature 1750-1900, Scottish literature, history and theory of fiction, Scottish enlightenment/romanticism, Scott, literature and the human sciences, Darwin