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This book explores eugenics in its wider social context and in
literary representations in post-war Britain. Drawing on a wide
range of sources in medicine, social and educational policy,
genetics, popular science, science fiction, and literary texts,
Hanson tracks the dynamic interactions between eugenic ideas across
diverse cultural fields, demonstrating the strength of the eugenic
imagination. Challenging assumptions that eugenics was fatally
compromised by its association with Nazi atrocities, or that it
petered out in the context of changed social attitudes in an
egalitarian post-war society, the book demonstrates that eugenic
thought not only persisted after 1945, but became more prominent.
Throughout, eugenics is defined as a cultural movement, rather than
more narrowly as a science, and the study is focused on its
border-crossing capacity as a 'style of thought.' By tracing the
expression of eugenic ideas across disciplinary boundaries and in
both high and low culture, this book demonstrates the powerful and
pervasive influence of eugenics in the post-war years. Authors
visited include Raymond Williams, John Braine, Agatha Christie,
Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, and J.G. Ballard.
This book explores eugenics in its wider social context and in
literary representations in post-war Britain. Drawing on a wide
range of sources in medicine, social and educational policy,
genetics, popular science, science fiction, and literary texts,
Hanson tracks the dynamic interactions between eugenic ideas across
diverse cultural fields, demonstrating the strength of the eugenic
imagination. Challenging assumptions that eugenics was fatally
compromised by its association with Nazi atrocities, or that it
petered out in the context of changed social attitudes in an
egalitarian post-war society, the book demonstrates that eugenic
thought not only persisted after 1945, but became more prominent.
Throughout, eugenics is defined as a cultural movement, rather than
more narrowly as a science, and the study is focused on its
border-crossing capacity as a 'style of thought.' By tracing the
expression of eugenic ideas across disciplinary boundaries and in
both high and low culture, this book demonstrates the powerful and
pervasive influence of eugenics in the post-war years. Authors
visited include Raymond Williams, John Braine, Agatha Christie,
Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, and J.G. Ballard.
This collection of essays maintaining links with theory and
practice applies a critical approach to the short story form. Some
are theoretical in orientation, covering such issues as gender and
marginality, while others offer readings of works by writers such
as Alice Munro and John McGahern.
This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture
from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women's
writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range
and intensity of women writers' engagement with post-war
transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the
gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the
reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the
Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen
essays range across 'literary', 'middlebrow' and 'popular' genres,
including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children's
literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and
journalism. They examine issues including realism and
experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of
'second-wave' feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass
migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment
of women's writing at a time of radical social change and rapid
cultural expansion.
Essays illustrating the range and diversity of post-1970 British
women writers. Despite the enduring popularity of contemporary
women's writing, British women writers have received scant critical
attention. They tend to be overshadowed by their American
counterparts in the media and have come to be represented within
the academy almost exclusively by Angela Carter and Jeanette
Winterson. This collection celebrates the range and diversity of
contemporary (post-1970) British women writers. It challenges
misconceptions about the natureand scope of fiction by women
writers working in Britain - commonly dismissed as parochial,
insular, dreary and domestic - and seeks to expand conventional
definitions of "British" by exploring how issues of nationality
intersectwith gender, class, race and sexuality. Writers covered
include Pat Barker, A.L. Kennedy, Maggie Gee, Rukhsana Ahmad, Joan
Riley, Jennifer Johnston, Ellen Galford, Susan Hill, Fay Weldon,
Emma Tennant, and Helen Fielding. Contributors: DAVID ELLIS, CLARE
HANSON, MAROULA JOANNOU, PAULINA PALMER, EMMA PARKER, FELICITY
ROSSLYN, CHRISTIANE SCHLOTE, JOHN SEARS, ELUNED SUMMERS-BREMNER,
IMELDA WHELEHAN, GINA WISKER.
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and
provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in
the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures,
and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides
fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and
challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By
engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production,
and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the
boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series
question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations
of both canonical and less well-known works. This is the first book
to explore the dramatic impact of genetics on literary fiction over
the past four decades. After James Watson and Francis Crick's
discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 and the subsequent
cracking of the genetic code, a gene-centric discourse developed
which had a major impact not only on biological science but on
wider culture. As figures like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins
popularised the neo-Darwinian view that behaviour was driven by
genetic self-interest, novelists were both compelled and unnerved
by such a vision of the origins and ends of life. This book maps
the ways in which Doris Lessing, A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, and Kazuo
Ishiguro wrestled with the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of
human nature and with the challenge it posed to humanist beliefs
about identity, agency, and morality. It argues that these
novelists were alienated to varying degrees by neo-Darwinian
arguments but that the recent shift to postgenomic science has
enabled a greater rapprochement between biological and
(post)humanist concepts of human nature. The postgenomic view of
organisms as agentic and interactive is echoed in the life-writing
of Margaret Drabble and Jackie Kay, which also explores the ethical
implications of this holistic biological perspective. As advances
in postgenomics, especially epigenetics, provoke increasing public
interest and concern, this book offers a timely analysis of debates
that have fundamentally altered our understanding of what it means
to be human.
Explores the multiple ways in which Mansfield's fiction resonates
with the landscapes opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis In
line with the recent surge of critical interest in early
psychology, the contributors read Mansfield's work alongside
figures like William James and Henri Bergson, opening up new
perspectives on affect in her work. While these essays trace
strands within the intellectual milieu in which Mansfield came of
age, others explore the intricate interplay between Mansfield's
fiction and Freudian theory, seeing her work as emblematic of the
uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis. Key
Features New readings of Mansfield's work alongside figures like
William James, Theodule Ribot and Henri Bergson New perspectives on
the representation of affect and emotion in Mansfield's fiction The
essays open up novel ways of thinking about fiction of unrivalled
psychological complexity Mansfield's work is shown to be emblematic
of the uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis
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