Evolution and secular teleology in the progressive epics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy

A number of epics written during the long nineteenth century were strongly influenced by ideas of evolution current in the science of the time. These progressive epics---Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Mathilde Blind's The Ascent of Man, and Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts---all take the gradual development of nature and mankind as their subject. In addition to being influenced by a desire to express a natural law of development, these epoists were also influenced by the preceding epic tradition. Shelley wrote in response to Milton, whose use of natural philosophy to depict the monism of the cosmos in Paradise Lost becomes a model for Shelley, while Blind consciously wrote her epic as a synthesis of Shelley and Darwin. They all expanded the epic sense of scale to the temporal dimension, depicting vast gulfs of time. Traditional epics often relied on Providence as the guiding principle of their historical consciousness. The atheism of the progressive epoists led them to replace the Christian deity in these works with Necessity and Providence with a secular teleology of progress. These concepts of development were informed by the gradualism of geology, early concepts of evolution, and, later in the century, by Darwin, whose rhetoric in The Origin of Species suggests that evolution generates an upward progress that results in increasingly greater organization.;This dissertation compares these common elements of the progressive epic as they develop over the century. It also examines how these epoists responded to different aspects of evolution that altered their expression of development, resulting in Blind's optimistic focus on the continuing evolution of altruism and Hardy's pessimistic exploration of the complexity of Necessity in the collective of the Immanent Will. Development in the progressive epic encompassed both natural and social development including both evolution and the role of the poet in affecting and improving culture. This dissertation also traces the shifting relationship between natural and cultural development as it moves from an implied connection, to a synthesis of natural and human history, and finally to an emphasis on cultural development.