Modernism and Eugenics Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration [Hardcover]

This book, first published in 2001, explores the impact of eugenics on the lives and work of such modernist writers as Woolf, Eliot and Yeats.In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs shows how Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and W. B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of race improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. Childs traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald Childs reveals how Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats believed in eugenics, the science of racial improvement, and adapted this scientific discourse to the language and purposes of the modern imagination. He traces the impact of the eugenics movement on such modernist works as Mrs. Dalloway, The Waste Land, and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. This is an original study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.Introduction; 1. Virginia Woolf's hereditary taint; 2. Boers, whores, and Mongols in Mrs Dalloway; 3. Body and biology in A Room of One's Own; 4. Eliot on biology and birthrates; 5. To breed or not to breed: the Eliots' question; 6. Fatlƒ·