Modernism and eugenics : Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the culture of degeneration / Donald J. Childs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Childs, Donald J., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941--Criticism and interpretation.

Woolf, Virginia.

Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965--Criticism and interpretation.

Eliot, T. S.

Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865-1939--Criticism and interpretation.

Yeats, W. B.

English literature--20th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain.

Modernism (Literature).

Degeneration in literature.

Eugenics in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 266 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Other Title:

Modernism & Eugenics

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Virginia Woolf's hereditary taint

Boers, whores, and Mongols in Mrs. Dalloway

Body and biology in A room of one's own

Eliot on biology and birthrates

To breed or not to breed: the Eliots' question

Fatal fertility in The waste land

The late eugenics of W.B. Yeats

Yeats and stirpiculture

Yeats and The sexual question.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-12393-3

0-521-03330-6

0-511-11970-4

0-511-48502-6

0-511-15377-5

0-511-30355-6

0-511-04407-0

1-280-15490-X

OCLC:

559251508