Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration

by Donald J. Childs

• ISBN13: 9780521033305
• ISBN10: 0521033306
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-02-12
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorization of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Virginia Woolf's Hereditary Taint	p. 22
Boers, Whores, and Mongols in Mrs. Dalloway	p. 38
Body and Biology in a Room of One's Own	p. 58
Eliot on Biology and Birthrates	p. 75
To Breed or Not to Breed: the Eliots' Question	p. 99
Fatal Fertility in the Waste Land	p. 121
The Late Eugenics of W. B. Teats	p. 149
Teats and Stirpiculture	p. 170
Teats and the Sexual Question	p. 203
Notes	p. 231
Index	p. 260
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