Modernism and Eugenics

Modernism and Eugenics
Author: M. Turda
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2010-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230281338

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Modernism and Eugenics comprehensively explores modern Europe's fixation with eugenic programmes of racial and national purification. It convincingly demonstrates that between 1870 and 1940 eugenicists were not only preoccupied with rescuing the individual from the anomie of modernity but equally championed a glorious racial destiny for the nation.

Modernism and Eugenics

Modernism and Eugenics
Author: Donald J. Childs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2001-09-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521806015

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In Modernism and Eugenics, first published in 2001, 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, A Room of One's Own, The Waste Land and Yeats's late poetry and early plays. The language of eugenics moves, he claims, between public discourse and personal perspectives. It informs Woolf's theorization of woman's imagination; in Eliot's poetry, it pictures as a nightmare the myriad contemporary eugenical threats to humankind's biological and cultural future. And for Yeats, it becomes integral to his engagement with the occult and his commitment to Irish Nationalism. This is an interesting study of a controversial theme which reveals the centrality of eugenics in the life and work of several major modernist writers.

Unnatural Selections

Unnatural Selections
Author: Daylanne K. English
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2005-12-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807863521

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Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding. English's interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimke as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race. English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Eugenics in the Garden

Eugenics in the Garden
Author: Fabiola López-Durán
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-03-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1477314962

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As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.

Race and the Modernist Imagination

Race and the Modernist Imagination
Author: Urmila Seshagiri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010
Genre: English fiction
ISBN: 9780801448218

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In addition to her readings of a fascinating array of works---The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness --

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics
Author: Alison Bashford
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 607
Release: 2010-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195373146

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Philippa Levine is the Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset. --

Queer Eugenics

Queer Eugenics
Author: Matt Franks
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN: 9781321362503

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"Queer Eugenics" argues that Anglophone women writers in the modernist period narrated how emerging forms of queer uplift were made productive for eugenics. Anticipating the neoliberal biopolitics of homonormativity and multiculturalism, writers and activists such as Virginia Woolf, Edith Ellis, Olive Moore, and Nella Larsen traced how certain deviant subjects--and especially queers--narrated themselves into eugenic national futurity through uplift, whereas otherwise they would have been cast as "unfit" and "degenerate." By exploring how sexual minorities contributed to eugenic projects of aesthetic and cultural enrichment, "Queer Eugenics" demonstrates the ways that the modes of biopolitics that emerged in the modernist period continued to manage life beyond the supposed death of eugenics after World War II and into its afterlife. In Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example, the queer modernist artist Lily is the figurative inheritor of the powers of the Victorian matriarch Mrs. Ramsay. By occupying this position of lesbian generational transmission and queer artistic productivity, however liminal, Lily represents the growing centrality of uplift as the incorporation of difference within eugenic discourses of national futurity. But Woolf also subtly traces the ways that her inclusion forecloses the possibility of reproductive freedom for others: notably the working class, colonized, disabled housekeeper Mrs. McNab. Figures like Lily proliferate in the works of women writers in this period, and their texts trace how the increasing flexibility and invisibility of eugenics continued to police the generational belonging and reproductive autonomy of women in increasingly productive ways through uplift. While scholars now recognize the centrality of eugenics in securing family and sexual normativity in early twentieth-century texts, "Queer Eugenics" intervenes into these accounts by investigating how deviant figures also took up and repurposed eugenic discourse for their own ends, with contradictory effects. For example, the lesbian eugenicist Edith Ellis developed the concept of "spiritual parenthood" as a way for queers and other "abnormals" to participate in eugenics without directly reproducing offspring. While queer versions of eugenics like Ellis's offered new forms of belonging to gays and lesbians, her articulation of generational futurity folds them into new and shifting stratifications of populations along lines of race, class, sexuality, and disability. In my reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand, for example, the tension is acute between certain white queers who were folded into generational futurity and black women who were slated for generational death. This project testifies to the diversity, adaptability, and pervasiveness of eugenics discourse in the modernist period, against scholars who read eugenics as a static and conservative ideology that modernist literature either replicates or contests. I read queer eugenics as a fulcrum that connects the emergence of twentieth century gay and lesbian subjectivities with the downfall of empire and the decline of eugenics, and I demonstrate how queer appropriations of eugenics represented a new generational temporality wherein queerness became integrated within emerging forms of biopolitics that produced, rather than suppressed, sexual and other forms of difference.

A Concise Companion to Modernism

A Concise Companion to Modernism
Author: David Bradshaw
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2008-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1405148713

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This concise Companion offers an innovative approach tounderstanding the Modernist literary mind in Britain, focusing onthe intellectual and cultural contexts, which shaped it. Offers an innovative approach to understanding the Modernistliterary mind in Britain. Helps readers to grasp the intellectual and cultural contextsof literary Modernism. Organised around contemporary ideas such as Freudianism andeugenics rather than literary genres. Relates literary Modernism to the overarching issues of theperiod, such as feminism, imperialism and war.

Eugenics in the Garden

Eugenics in the Garden
Author: Fabiola López-Durán
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-03-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1477314989

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Winner, Robert Motherwell Book Award, Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts, The Dedalus Foundation, 2019 As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.

Eugenics

Eugenics
Author: Philippa Levine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2017
Genre: Eugenics
ISBN: 0199385904

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A concise and gripping account of eugenics from its origins in the twentieth century and beyond.