Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880-1940

Greenslade, William

Abstract

Towards the end of the nineteenth century many affluent and educated people, influenced by developments in medical, biological and psychiatric sciences, became convinced that ignorance, insanity and criminality - even homosexuality and hysteria - were symptoms of the degeneration of the human race. Such theories seemed to provide plausible explanations for disturbing social changes and new insights into human character and morality. For a time they achieved extraordinary dominance. This book is the first to investigate the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and on fiction. It traces the difficulties experienced by writers, including Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, in negotiating their own freedom of interpretation in the light of such theories. The book pursues the survival of degenerationism in the work of popular writers Warwick Deeping and John Buchan, and charts its cultural resilience through the 1930s, and to the holocaust.

• Book Type: Monograph
• Publication Date: 1994
• Deposit Date: Nov 24, 2023
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• ISBN: 0521416655
• Keywords: Degeneration, Culture, British Novel
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11459450
• Contract Date: Nov 1, 1992