| Summary: | The essay explores how a poem, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's poem 'The Four Year Old Girl' (1998), and a novel, Michael Byers's Long for This World (2003), draw on the resources of the aesthetic to reflect on epistemological, ethical, and affective consequences of genetic variation that generates per- ceived disability. Although neither text explicitly addresses epigenetics, the same drive to understand genetic information in terms of development and environment which drives biological and medical research in epigenetics is very much present. The essay discusses the semantic space occupied by the concept of epigenetics, and then asks how, if at all, poetry might contribute to the intense debates opened up by challenges to genetic determinism by transgenerational heritability of changes to DNA. The essay contrasts avant-garde poetry with both amateur poetry about genetic disability and with a realist novel depicting a doctor and his family trying to help a child with a severe genetic condition. I suggest that we can think of Long for This World as an epigenetic novel, and 'The Four Year Old Girl' as an investigation of the semantic space now being opened up by epigenetics.
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