The First Page: Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel

THE FIRST PAGE

Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel.
Zola, Hardy, and Utopian Fiction

by Niall Sreenan

24 February 2026

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Series. On 3 March 2026, Niall Sreenan will present his book Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel, in which he traces the shock waves that Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution – displacing the human from the centre of the natural order and consigning it to the same ‘struggle for life’ as its animal ancestors – sent into literature and culture. Sreenan is, in particular, revisiting the legacy of Darwin’s thought in works by Thomas Hardy, Émile Zola, Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley,
and Michel Houellebecq.

INTRODUCTION
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Rethinking the Human after Darwin

Bien sûr, c’est à la science que doivent s’adresser les romanciers et les poètes, elle est aujourd’hui l’unique source possible. Mais, voilà! que lui prendre, comment marcher avec elle? Tout de suite, je sens que je patauge. — ÉMILE ZOLA
[Science, of course, is what poets and novelists are going to have to turn to; science is their only possible source these days. But there you are again! What are they to get out of it? How are they to keep up with it? As soon as I think of that, my mind goes blank.]

In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus […]. The second blow fell when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin, Wallace and their predecessors, though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. — SIGMUND FREUD

Émile Zola’s L’Oeuvre (1886), the fourteenth work in his twenty-novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart, posits a radical scientifico-aesthetic programme. ‘[L]a science’, argues the fictional novelist, Sandoz, is the only possible foundation for an adequately post-Romantic realist literary aesthetic. Subtitled as Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire, Zola’s sprawling literary-scientific project draws on the sciences of heredity, experimental medicine, and positivist social theory to realise in social and biological totality the history of a single fictional family across the span of Second Empire France. Positioning his work in opposition to the individual social scope of Honoré de Balzac’s ‘zoologie humaine’, Zola frames …

Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel. Zola, Hardy, and Utopian Fiction was published by Modern Humanities Research Association in December 2025.

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NIALL SREENAN is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University of St Andrews. His interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, including nineteenth-century literature and evolutionary science, utopian writing and the representation of islands, and psychoanalysis. Following a degree in Music and English Literature at University College Cork and the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, Niall moved to London and completed an MA in Comparative Literature at King’s College London and PhD in Comparative Literature from University College London. He is now working on a new project on literature and child adoption.

On 3 March 2026 Niall Sreenan will launch his book Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel. Zola, Hardy, and Utopian Fiction at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image (detail) by Michael Heise via Unsplash.