Abstract
Eugenics emerged as a site of struggle over the definition and delineation of nature and nurture. I argue that a biopolitics frame reveals how literature was itself often understood to play a direct role in upwardly evolving the population in the early twentieth century. Eugenic plots not only advocate for so-called “better breeding” through representation on the page. Eugenic plots also seek to directly improve the biological material of its readers, in the flesh, in keeping with the Lamarckian paradigm. Eugenic plots reveal that biopolitics does not merely transform the biological into the substance and source of power. Biopolitics delineates the realms of the biological and cultural, the scientific and the literary in the first place and seeks to regulate their interaction.
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Schuller, K. (2020). Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_24
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