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,...

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilise what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought.