1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910780281803321

Autore

Childs Donald J.

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge : , : Cambridge University Press, , 2001

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

Descrizione fisica

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

Disciplina

820.9/112/09041

Soggetti

English literature - 20th century - History and criticism

Modernism (Literature) - Great Britain

Degeneration in literature

Eugenics in literature

Race in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

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

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.