1. Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene -- 2. Simon Mawer’s Book of Life: Mendel’s Dwarf as Fictional Genetic Life Writing -- 3. There is grandeur in this view of life...or is there? Ian McEwan’s Poetics of Chance and the Unreliable Structures of Genetic Determinism -- 4. Genetics’ Perilous Analogies: Metaphors of Life in A. S. Byatt’s Quartet -- 5. Ecologies of Life: Genetics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy -- 6. Conclusion: Levels of Life.

Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction argues that literary fiction has reimagined life in the age of genetics. The new genetic paradigm has proposed to rewrite core assumptions about such fundamental aspects of life as the nature of kinship and biological connection, human-environmental relations, or the link between biology and art. Investigating major texts of genetic fiction by A. S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Simon Mawer and Margaret Atwood, this monograph offers the first systematic study of how these assumptions about life itself have been renegotiated through the contemporary novel’s engagement with genetic science. This book identifies a significant new phase in the novel’s aesthetic exploration of life and demonstrates that the novel emerges as the cultural form uniquely positioned to engage both the imaginative and concrete challenges raised by genetic science for the lifeworlds of the new millennium. Paul Hamann-Rose is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Passau, Germany.