Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century

by Luczak, Ewa Barbara

• ISBN13: 9781137545787
• ISBN10: 113754578X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-09-02
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century investigates the impact of eugenic discourse on American literary production in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Analyzing the eugenic language of biological reform, racial improvement, and hereditarian social reconstruction, this book delineates the complex and often surprising ways that the conceptual assumptions of eugenics regarding reproduction, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity fundamentally shaped American literary imaginations. Through writers like Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and George S. Schuyler, Luczak demonstrates that, despite the general assumption that eugenics was a marginal strain in American thought, it should be understood as a crucial force in the ideological structuring of American culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Author Biography

Ewa Barbara Luczak is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland and Vice President of the Polish Association for American Studies. She is the author of How Their Living Outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature and editor of books on race and American and African American literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. "A Truly Angelic Society": Eugenic Humanity Without Humans
2. "Practical-Headed Judgment Of A Stock-Breeder": Sexual Selection In The Early Fiction Of Jack London
3. "Vast And Malodorous Sea": Racial Degeneration In Jack London's The People Of The Abyss And The Scarlet Plague
4. Eugenic Strands In The Gynaecocentric Criticism Of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
5. "Endowment Of Motherhood": Gilman's Utopian Fiction
6. "At Best Race Is A Superstition": George S. Schuyler's Journalistic Battles With Racial Absolutism
7. Between "Chromatic Emancipation" And A Fascist State: Schuyler's Black No More And Black Empire
Conclusions: Before We Move Forward