Introduction
1. Degeneration
2. Biological poetics
3. Degenerate spaces: the urban crisis of the 1880s and The Mayor of Casterbridge
4. Reversionary tactics
5. Criminal degeneracy: adventures with Lombroso
6. Max Nordau and the Degeneration effect
7. Women and the disease of civilisation: George Gissing's The Whirlpool
8. The lure of pedigree and the menaces of heredity in Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Jude the Obscure
9. Race-regeneration
10. Masculinity, morbidity and medicine: Howards End and Mrs Dalloway
11. The way out is the way back: the anti-modernists
12. Postscripts
Notes
Bibliography
Index.
