Marks of the beast: Degeneration theory and occult literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Marks of the Beast: Degeneration Theory and Occult Literature of the Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Centuries scrutinizes images and metaphors, associated with sexual, racial, and mental forms of degeneracy in the evolutionist discourses and occult fictions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. This study examines the conflicting affective responses (fascination and dread, repulsion and ridicule) that were often aroused by contact with unusual bodies and deviant personalities. In doing so, it suggests that the social anxieties and prejudices that had formerly generated interest in representations of the grotesque, the monstrous, and the freakish in earlier centuries had largely been transferred to the degenerate---a more inclusive category---by the end of the nineteenth century. By foregrounding the physical and mental instabilty of animal-human hybrids, crack-brained scientists, and drug-dependent scholars created by scientifically-literate authors, Marks of the Beast exposes intense interactions between popular fiction and the degeneracy-charged theories of alienists, anthropologists, sexologists, teratologists, phrenologists, pharmacologists, and microbiologists during this time period.