Reflects contemporary paradigm shifts in embryology and evolutionary theory through formal experimentation in the modernist Bildungsroman Modernist Life Histories explores how new models of embryonic development helped inspire new kinds of coming-of-age plots during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley and Samuel Beckett, the book links narrative experiments with shuffled chronology, repeated beginnings and sex change to new discoveries in the biological sciences. It also reveals new connections between the so-called Two Cultures by highlighting how scientific ideas and narratives enter the literary realm. Daniel Aureliano Newman is Instructor at the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication, University of Toronto.