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Biological Inheritance And The Social Order In Late-Victorian Fiction And Science, Sherrin Berezowsky

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms bio-power. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at …