GROWTH AND ITS MYTHS

Evolutionary theory brings together two imaginative elements implicit in much nineteenth-century thinking and creativity. One was the fascination with growth expressed also in Natürphilosophie and in Bildungsroman. The other was the concept of transformation. The intellectual interest in märchen, fairy-tale, and myth, which increased as the century went on, was fuelled by these preoccupations, while its methodology was indebted to evolutionary patterns of argument. The work of anthropologists and mythographers such as Müller, Lubbock, Tylor, and Lang was strengthened by reference to the work of Darwin and Spencer, though their responses to Spencer were on the whole a good deal less enthusiastic than to Darwin.

The extraordinary metamorphoses within the natural life cycle of creatures such as frogs and butterflies, as well as the sustained transformation of baby into adult, had long been a subject of marvel. Such transformation now became a preoccupation with theorists of development: