Race and biology

Greenslade, William

Abstract

The period 1880-1920 saw the emergence and then the qualified effacing of powerful discourses of racial essentialism and biological determinism: it was a period profoundly influenced, even mesmerized, by the authority of Darwinian science. This chapter examines how these widely circulating discourses were integral to the development of eugenic ideas in the this period, and explores how they gave writers typological resources both to voice such deterministic ideas and to offer points of resistance through the different subject positions that their texts could adopt.

• Publication Date: Oct 13, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 321-334
• Book Title: Late Victorian into Modern
• ISBN: 9780198704393
• Keywords: race, biology, eugenics, Darwinian science, the novel
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/907269
• Publisher URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/late-victorian-into-modern-9780198704393?lang=en&cc=gb