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Abstract:

This project aims to describe scientific popularization as a genre that traverses the boundaries of literature, science and cultural criticism. The project develops a comparative case study of essayistic work by three prominent British authors from subsequent historical periods (T. H. Huxley between the 1850s and 1895, Julian Huxley from the 1920s up to 1970, and Richard Dawkins since the 1970s). Narratological, rhetorical-tropological and historical analyses of the texts are combined with a view to identifying the specific ways in which the authors have employed the mimetic and discursive potential of literary prose as a medium for both the dissemination of scientific knowledge (i.c. theories and ideas from evolutionary biology) on the one hand and the manipulation of social and political realities on the other.