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Dark Degenerations: Life, Light, and Transformation beneath the Earth, 1840–circa 1900

Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Focusing on Kentucky’s immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of “dark degeneracy” that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus on the how of natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments. At the same time, it evidences the influence of Mammoth Cave in forging and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings of life in the deep darkness.
Source: Isis
DOI: 10.1086/719721
Author: Andrew Flack
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4281298385
FWCI: 5.063
Cites: 41
Cited by: 5
Related to: 10