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"In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and its enduring connections to racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined 'agrotopias'-sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises-elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial 'improvement' as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population"--

Environmentalism in literature. --- Agriculture in literature. --- Eugenics in literature. --- Racism in literature. --- Sustainable agriculture --- History.

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Literature and science --- Race in literature. --- Eugenics in literature. --- Motherhood in literature. --- Birth control in literature. --- Abortion in literature. --- American fiction --- History and criticism.

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Cecily Devereux reconsiders the extent to which McClung's enduring legacy of crusading for women's rights is founded on the ideas of British eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Caleb Saleeby and implicated in the passage of eugenical legislation in Canada. In a critical study of Painted Fires, the Pearlie Watson books, and several short stories, Devereux attempts to understand McClung's fiction in terms of its engagement with a politics of "race" and nation and constructions of specifically "racial" impurities that many women saw themselves as uniquely able to "cure."

Eugenics in literature. --- Feminism in literature. --- British --- British people --- Britishers --- Britons (British) --- Brits --- Ethnology --- Feminist theory in literature --- Social aspects. --- McClung, Nellie L., --- McClung, Nellie Letitia Mooney, --- Mooney, Nellie Letitia,

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In receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, Günter Grass, a prominent and controversial figure in the ongoing discussion of the German past and reunification, finally gained recognition as Germany's greatest living author, a writer of international importance and acclaim. Grass's 1959 novel 'The Tin Drum' remains one of the most important works of literature for the construction of postwar German identity. Peter Arnds offers a completely new reading of the novel, analyzing an aspect of Grass's literary treatment of German history that has never been examined in detail: the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, which resulted in the persecution of so-called asocials as 'life unworthy of life,' their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich, and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. Arnds shows that in order to represent the Nazi past and subvert bourgeois paradigms of rationalism, Grass revives several facets of popular culture that National Socialism either suppressed or manipulated for its ideology of racism. In structure and content Grass's novel connects the persecution of degenerate art to the persecution and extermination of these 'asocials,' for whom the persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath becomes a central metaphor and voice. This comparative study reveals that Grass creates in the novel an irrational counterculture opposed to the rationalism of Nazi science and its obsession with racial hygiene, while simultaneously exposing the continuity of this destructive rationalism in postwar Germany and the absurdity of a 'Stunde Null,' that putative tabula rasa in 1945. Peter O. Arnds is associate professor of German and Italian at Kansas State University.

Eugenics in literature. --- Grass, Günter, --- Grass, Günter, --- German past. --- Günter Grass. --- Nazi ideology of race. --- Nazi ideology. --- Nazi science. --- Nobel Prize for Literature. --- Stunde Null. --- The Tin Drum. --- asocials. --- destruction rationalism. --- eugenics. --- postwar German identity. --- postwar Germany. --- representation. --- subversion.

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The Enlightenment commitment to reason naturally gave rise to a belief in the perfectibility of man. Influenced by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, many eighteenth-century writers argued that the proper education and upbringing¿breeding¿could make any man a member of the cultural elite. Yet even in this egalitarian environment, the concept of breeding remained tied to theories of blood lineage, caste distinction, and biological difference. Turning to the works of Locke, Rousseau, Swift, Defoe, and other giants of the British Enlightenment, Jenny Davidson revives the debates that raged over the husbandry of human nature and highlights their critical impact on the development of eugenics, the emergence of fears about biological determinism, and the history of the language itself. Combining rich historical research with a keen sense of story, she links explanations for the physical resemblance between parents and children to larger arguments about culture and society and shows how the threads of this compelling conversation reveal the character of a century. A remarkable intellectual history, Breeding not only recasts the fundamental concerns of the Enlightenment but also uncovers the seeds of thought that bloomed into contemporary notions of human perfectibility.

English literature --- Breeding --- Education and heredity --- Nature and nurture --- Breeding in literature. --- Heredity in literature. --- Biology in literature. --- Eugenics in literature. --- Eugenics --- Literature and science --- History and criticism. --- Philosophy --- History --- Philosophy --- History --- Philosophy --- History --- History --- History