Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination

Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century

Ewa Barbara Luczak

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137545794
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

A disturbing but ultimately discredited strain in American thought, eugenics was a crucial ideological force in the early twentieth century. Luczak investigates the work of writers like Jack London and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, to consider the impact of eugenic racial discourse on American literary production from 1900-1940.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “A T ruly A ngelic S ociety”: E ugenic H umanity w ithout 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
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index