Degeneration, Culture and the Novel

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel PDF Author: William M. Greenslade
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521416655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
An exploration of the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and fiction.

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel PDF Author: William M. Greenslade
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521416655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
An exploration of the impact of degeneration theories on British culture and fiction.

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel

Degeneration, Culture and the Novel PDF Author: William P. Greenslade
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521131124
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
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. In this book William Greenslade investigates the impact of degeneration theories on British culture, and on fiction. He traces the difficulties experienced by writers, including Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Wells, Forster and Woolf, in negotiating their own freedom of interpretation in the light of such theories; he pursues the survival of degenerationism in the work of popular writers Warwich Deeping and John Buchan; and he charts the resilience of its tropes through the 1930s.

Degenerative Realism

Degenerative Realism PDF Author: Christy Wampole
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

The Gothic Body

The Gothic Body PDF Author: Kelly Hurley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521552591
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The popularity of the Gothic in the British fin de siècle, and its links with scientific and social theories.

Modernism and Eugenics

Modernism and Eugenics PDF Author: Donald J. Childs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521806015
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
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.

The Great Degeneration

The Great Degeneration PDF Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125524
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower, a searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective future What causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions—the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail—are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency—and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

Generation and Degeneration

Generation and Degeneration PDF Author: Valeria Finucci
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822380277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This distinctive collection explores the construction of genealogies—in both the biological sense of procreation and the metaphorical sense of heritage and cultural patrimony. Focusing specifically on the discourses that inform such genealogies, Generation and Degeneration moves from Greco-Roman times to the recent past to retrace generational fantasies and discords in a variety of related contexts, from the medical to the theological, and from the literary to the historical. The discourses on reproduction, biology, degeneration, legacy, and lineage that this book broaches not only bring to the forefront concepts of sexual identity and gender politics but also show how they were culturally constructed and reconstructed through the centuries by medicine, philosophy, the visual arts, law, religion, and literature. The contributors reflect on a wide range of topics—from what makes men “manly” to the identity of Christ’s father, from what kinds of erotic practices went on among women in sixteenth-century seraglios to how men’s hemorrhoids can be variously labeled. Essays scrutinize stories of menstruating males and early writings on the presumed inferiority of female bodily functions. Others investigate a psychomorphology of the clitoris that challenges Freud’s account of lesbianism as an infantile stage of sexual development and such topics as the geographical origins of medicine and the materialization of genealogy in the presence of Renaissance theatrical ghosts. This collection will engage those in English, comparative, Italian, Spanish, and French studies, as well as in history, history of medicine, and ancient and early modern religious studies. Contributors. Kevin Brownlee, Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Elizabeth Clark, Valeria Finucci, Dale Martin, Gianna Pomata, Maureen Quilligan, Nancy Siraisi, Peter Stallybrass,Valerie Traub

Faces of Degeneration

Faces of Degeneration PDF Author: Daniel Pick
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521457538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Exploring the historical contexts in France, Italy, and England within which the idea was developed, this text traces the political issues to which the concept of degeneration gave rise during the period from the revolutions of 1848 to the First World War and beyond.

Degeneration

Degeneration PDF Author: Max Simon Nordau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Comparative literature
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description


Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture

Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture PDF Author: Lee D. Baker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century, if ethnologists in the United States recognized African American culture, they often perceived it as something to be overcome and left behind. At the same time, they were committed to salvaging “disappearing” Native American culture by curating objects, narrating practices, and recording languages. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee D. Baker examines theories of race and culture developed by American anthropologists during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. He investigates the role that ethnologists played in creating a racial politics of culture in which Indians had a culture worthy of preservation and exhibition while African Americans did not. Baker argues that the concept of culture developed by ethnologists to understand American Indian languages and customs in the nineteenth century formed the basis of the anthropological concept of race eventually used to confront “the Negro problem” in the twentieth century. As he explores the implications of anthropology’s different approaches to African Americans and Native Americans, and the field’s different but overlapping theories of race and culture, Baker delves into the careers of prominent anthropologists and ethnologists, including James Mooney Jr., Frederic W. Putnam, Daniel G. Brinton, and Franz Boas. His analysis takes into account not only scientific societies, journals, museums, and universities, but also the development of sociology in the United States, African American and Native American activists and intellectuals, philanthropy, the media, and government entities from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Supreme Court. In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Baker tells how anthropology has both responded to and helped shape ideas about race and culture in the United States, and how its ideas have been appropriated (and misappropriated) to wildly different ends.