Early in the twentieth century, Russia was experiencing a decadent period of cultural degeneration just as science was developing ways to identify medical conditions which supposedly reflected the health of the entire nation. Leonid Andreev, the leading literary figure of his ti…
An obsession with "degeneration" was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in "degeneration theory" - including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld - we…
"An obsession with 'degeneration' was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in 'degeneration theory' - including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld - w…
"An obsession with “degeneration” was a central preoccupation of modernist culture at the start of the 20th century. Less attention has been paid to the fact that many of the key thinkers in “degeneration theory” – including Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau, and Magnus Hirschfeld – w…
No scholar today would describe late antiquity as an age of "decline and fall", as Gibbon did; instead, to use Marrou's term, it is seen as an "other antiquity", which deserves to be investigated on its own terms. Yet the idea of a decadent period, accompanied by a fascination f…
No scholar today would describe late antiquity as an age of "decline and fall", as Gibbon did; instead, to use Marrou's term, it is seen as an "other antiquity", which deserves to be investigated on its own terms. Yet the idea of a decadent period, accompanied by a fascination f…
"In Modernism and Eugenics, Donald J. 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 th…