Download or read book Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (Routledge Revivals) written by Allan Hunter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1983, this book explores a number of avenues of critical thinking about Joseph Conrad, showing him as an author deeply concerned with humankind’s ethical motivation and its relationship with the ideas of evolution current in his day. Allan Hunter establishes Conrad’s detailed knowledge of the leading evolutionary arguments of the period and the main questions posed: were ethics God-given or were morals merely an evolved attribute? His novels are shown as debates with, and extensions of, the theories of Huxley, Darwin, Carlyle, Spencer, Lombroso and others on the nature of humanity and altruism.