m Darwin s Bulldog and Huxley ’s Ape Keith Leslie Johnson CZ)ne of the initial difficulties in assessing the impact of a figure hke Darwin on literary history is determining to what extent his influence is a function of the man himself — his actual theories, writings, and so forth — or the cultural fantasies that have cropped up around him. Where these fantasies are not conditioned by outright ignorance and misinformation, they often as not stem from crucial misprisions. For this reason, attempts to unmask the real so-and-so behind the signifier are often mooted firom a Hterary standpoint, though there is, of course, real intellectual value in such retrievals. To sidestep some of these issues. I ’ d like to take a slightly different tack on the question of Darwin ’s legacy, which is to think about the availability of such misprisions for Hterary thought rather than reha - bilitate an “ authentic ” Darwinism or, for that matter, deploy his theories in the course of an interpretation. Literary appHcations of Darwin ’ s scientific theories in recent years (by Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, for example) have been slow to gather supporters, and that may be because, even while humanities types acknowledge the intrigue of empirical ap - proaches, they tend to share a basic intuition: that understanding Dar - win ’ s thought (now more than ever, as the cliche goes) is perhaps more important in its ethical and, ultimately, biopolitical dimension than in its scientific or methodological one.^ I would contend that this is the upshot of most cultural histories of nineteenth-century Darwinism, like those by Gillian Beer and George Levine. These two critics conclude their works with ethicopolitical ru - minations on Hardy and Conrad, respectively — writers who straddle the centennial divide — indicating to my mind a gradual shift away from Victorian formal engagements with Darwinism (for example at the level of plot) toward more modernist philosophical and existential ones.^ No Iwentieth-Century Literature 55.4 Winter 2009 572