Autorentext
Kimberly W. Benston is Francis B. Gummere Professor of English at Haverford College, where he has also served as director of the Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities, provost, and the fifteenth president, and from which he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask and Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. He is editor of Imamu Amiri Baraka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, Larry Neal: Essays, the Performance Special Issue of PMLA, and the Black Arts Movement section of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.

Klappentext

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• The 1896 William Heinemann edition of Wells's novel-a cauldron of scientific ambition, interspecies conflict, and neocolonial violence-with a glossary of nautical, botanical, and geological terms.
• A preface with a note on the text, contextualizing headnotes, and explanatory footnotes by Kimberly W. Benston.
• Eight illustrations, including the 1896 frontispiece and artworks relating to the novel's context.
• An especially rich selection of contextual materials, topically organized: "Evolution: Theory, Society, Language, and Ethics"; "Race, Cannibalism, and Empire"; "Animality, Science, and the Vivisection Debate"; and "Wells on Evolution, Pain, Extinction, and Animal Mind."
• Fourteen critical interpretations, from reviews upon publication to current critical scholarship.
• A chronology of Wells's life and a selected bibliography.