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

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.

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.

Grounded in extraordinary archival research and informed by both theoretical sophistication and sensitivity to textual nuance, this pathbreaking and revelatory book will be required reading for historians and literary scholars alike. Luczak's decision to center her compelling study on Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and George Schuyler proves absolutely inspired as she not only challenges conventional wisdom regarding their work but also uses her trenchant analysis to mount a wide-ranging, energetic, boldly provocative, and unflinching engagement with the troublingly pervasive impact of eugenics thought in American culture. (Richard Yarborough, Professor of English & African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

Luczak offers a broad cultural history of eugenic thinking while at the same time providing remarkably fresh and compelling interpretations of three important writers. Through her extensive acquaintance with the science, social theories, laws, and literature associated with eugenics, Luczak shows a masterly command of the arguments made on behalf of theories we may now dismiss as marginal or retrograde when in fact they once occupied a position of privilege and surprising authority in early twentieth-century American thought. - Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor lóË