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

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. Front Matter....Pages i-viii Introduction....Pages 1-12 “A Truly Angelic Society”: Eugenic Humanity without Humans....Pages 13-38 “Practical-Headed Judgment of a Stock-Breeder”: Sexual Selection in the Early Fiction of Jack London....Pages 39-66 “Vast and Malodorous Sea”: Racial Degeneration in Jack London’s The People of the Abyss and The Scarlet Plague....Pages 67-97 Eugenic Strands in the Gynaecocentric Criticism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman....Pages 99-125 “Endowment of Motherhood”: Gilman’s Utopian Fiction....Pages 127-156 “At Best Race Is a Superstition”: George S. Schuyler’s Journalistic Battles with Racial Absolutism....Pages 157-179 Between “Chromatic Emancipation” and a Fascist State: Schuyler’s Black No More and Black Empire....Pages 181-202 Conclusions....Pages 203-214 Back Matter....Pages 215-275