Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene

Repositioning genetic responses to age-old questions about the nature of life from the neglected periphery to the limelight of scholarly concern, this book reveals how the novel’s manifold engagements with genetic ideas, structures and social, political and planetary implications unfold from the attraction of this new and encompassing understanding of life itself. In this introductory chapter, I contextualise my argument that at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century the novel has fundamentally reimagined life through genetic science. First, I establish the major innovations and provocative implications of the new genetic understanding of life itself. I then outline how this new understanding relies on central cultural mediators, especially metaphors around information and textuality, and how this genetic discourse has challenged fundamental cultural assumptions and social practices. I explain my approach which combines a historicist outlook with a focus on the novel’s formal responses to a genetic logic of life. I argue that throughout its history, the novel has engaged biological conceptions of life as part of a contest of values and socio-cultural imaginaries. The novel’s exploration of genetic conceptions of life presents the latest transformation in this historical trajectory of the form.