Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination

Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules for the Twentieth Century investigates the impact of eugenic discourse on American literary production in the first four decades of the 20th century. It explores the response of major American writers to the eugenic language of biological reform, racial improvement and the hereditarian social reconstruction. It delineates the complex and often surprising ways in which the conceptual assumptions of eugenics regarding reproduction, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity fundamentally shaped American literary imaginations. What was the lure of eugenics for writers such as Jack London or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who considered themselves progressive? Was the literary interest in eugenics a response, at least in part, to the challenges of early-twentieth-century modernity, a key feature of which was the growing significance and cultural authority of naturalistic scientific discourse? How did eugenics influence the work of writers like George Schuyler, who explicitly repudiated what they saw as a racist, inhumane, and dangerous science? Luczak demonstrates that rather than merely an odd, disturbing but ultimately marginal strain in American thought, eugenics should be understood as a crucial force in the ideological structuring of American culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.