Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880}}}1940 [Paperback]

An exploration of the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and fiction.Towards the end of the nineteenth century developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences encouraged theories of the degeneration of the human race. Here William Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and explores the trope in the work of novelists including Hardy, Woolf and Buchan.Towards the end of the nineteenth century developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences encouraged theories of the degeneration of the human race. Here William Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and explores the trope in the work of novelists including Hardy, Woolf and Buchan.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 dislc›