Atavistic Tendencies ─ The Culture of Science in American Modernity

In the American late modernity of the late 18th and early 19th century, the concept of atavism became pervasive in literary, scientific, and photographic discourses, Seitler (English, U. of Toronto) argues, upsetting linear understandings of time and human progress; reflecting societal anxieties of race, sexuality, and class; and marking a fundamental shift in ways of knowing and understanding the human. In this study, she traces the emergence of the idea of atavism in visual, literary, and scientific production. Six chapters discuss the formal and tropological devices deployed by Freudian psychoanalysis to establish human sexual drives as atavistic; the showcasing of the atavistic in medical photography; sexual desire as animal atavism in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute and Djuna Barnes's Nightwood; discourses of heredity in relation to ideas of modern progress or decay in the Tarzan and Dr. Fu Manchu serial novels; "eugenic feminism" in the fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a project to combat atavism; and scenes of embrace as atavistic entanglement in Jack London's The Sea-Wolf, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, and Richard Washburn Child's "The Gorilla." Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)