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

ISBN-13: 9781137545787 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 275 str.

Ewa Barbara Luczak

Opis

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.

O autorze

Ewa Barbara Luczak is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of How Their Living Outside America Affected Five African American Authors: Toward a Theory of Expatriate Literature.