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The Solid & The Shifting: Darwinian Time, Evolutionary Form And The Greek Ideal 
In The Early Works Of Virginia Woolf, Joseph Monroe Kreutziger

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

“The Solid & the Shifting”: Evolutionary Form, Darwinian Time, and the Greek Ideal in the Early Works of Virginia Woolf

By

Joseph Kreutziger

Doctor of Philosophy in English and American Literature

Washington University in St. Louis, 2017

Professors Melanie Micir, Robert Milder, Steven Meyer, Vincent Sherry, Zoe Stamatopoulou

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“Now is life very solid or very shifting?” Virginia Woolf asks in her diary of 1931, a question she claims haunts her in its contradictions. This dynamism between the solid and the shifting aspects of life and temporality is fundamental to an analysis of Woolf’s writing process. …

Darwinian Evolutionary Theory And Constructions Of Race In Nazi Germany: A Literary And Cultural Analysis Of Darwin’S Works And Nazi Rhetoric, Emily M. Wollmuth

Departmental Honors Projects

First published in 1856, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is one of the most impactful scientific writings in history. While the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory on historical events has been widely studied, no single work of scholarship has previously combined close reading of Origin’s representations of “race” with analysis of how those constructions of “racial” difference are (mis)translated across the cultural discourses of the eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. Through comparative cultural studies and close literary analysis of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Darwin’s works—including Origin, Descent of Man, and Voyage of the Beagle, this paper examines how evolutionary …