Race and romance: Ethnology, eugenics and the evolution of the nineteenth-century novel

This dissertation examines the interplay between the various novelistic genres and the racial theories of the nineteenth century. Chapters One and Two analyze Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in light of the polygenetic theories of the separate creation of the races. Chapter Three looks at the responses of William Wells Brown and Martin Delany to these same theories. Mark Twain's dependence on eugenic ideology dominates the Fifth chapter. In chapter Six, Fitzgerald's modernism is seen as accommodating the racial notions of his day.