Edited by Angelique Richardson
“What is emotion?” pondered the young Charles Darwin in his
notebooks. How were the emotions to be placed in an evolutionary framework? And
what light might they shed on human-animal continuities? These were among the
questions Darwin explored in his research, assisted both by an acute sense of
observation and an extraordinary capacity for fellow feeling, not only with
humans but with all animal life. After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind
explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up
through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the
human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were
taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily
News. Bringing together scholars from biology, literature, history, psychology,
psychiatry and paediatrics, the volume provides an invaluable reassessment of
Darwin’s contribution to a new understanding of the moral sense and emotional
life, and considers the urgent scientific and ethical implications of his ideas
today.
