Degeneration, Culture and the Novel
1880–1940

An exploration of the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and fiction.

William P. Greenslade (Author)

9780521131124, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 February 2010

372 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.55 kg

Towards the end of the nineteenth century many affluent and educated people, influenced by developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences, became convinced that ignorance, insanity and criminality – even homosexuality and hysteria – were symptoms of the degeneration of the human race. Such theories seemed to provide plausible explanations for disturbing social changes, and new insights into human character and morality. For a time they achieved extraordinary dominance. In this book William Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and on fiction. He traces the difficulties experienced by writers, including Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Wells, Forster and Woolf, in negotiating their own freedom of interpretation in the light of such theories; he pursues the survival of degenerationism in the work of popular writers Warwich Deeping and John Buchan; and he charts the resilience of its tropes through the 1930s.

Introduction
1. Degeneration
2. Biological poetics
3. Degenerate spaces: the urban crisis of the 1880s and The Mayor of Casterbridge
4. Reversionary tactics
5. Criminal degeneracy: adventures with Lombroso
6. Max Nordau and the Degeneration effect
7. Women and the disease of civilisation: George Gissing's The Whirlpool
8. The lure of pedigree and the menaces of heredity in Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure
9. Race-regeneration
10. Masculinity, morbidity and medicine: Howards End and Mrs Dalloway
11. The way out is the way back: the anti-modernists
12. Postscripts
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]