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A Counter-History of Crime FictionThe Rhetoric of Atavism and Degeneration

A Counter-History of Crime Fiction: The Rhetoric of Atavism and Degeneration [The dream of being able to read the mind through the body — thus making ‘evil’ legible — has a long history. Physiognomy boasts an ancient lineage that can be traced back to Aristotle, but it was in the eighteenth century that the belief in the correspondence between the outer and inner nature of human beings acquired the status of a pseudo-science and came to play a major role in the European imagination. When the Swiss pastor and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater authored the influential Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy, 1775–78), physiognomy was regarded by many as a benign fruit of the Enlightenment despite its racist and anti-Semitic implications. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, however, reacted against Lavater’s attempt to force the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to convert to Christianity and he also spoke out against Lavater’s conviction that the fixed features of the face may be read as a mirror of the soul. In a pamphlet published in 1778 Lichtenberg famously wrote: ‘If physiognomy becomes what Lavater expects it to become then children will be hanged before they have committed the deeds which deserve the gallows.’1 Physiognomists, in fact, claimed to be able to detect evil tendencies before they had been translated into crime, and this preventive universal judgement — as Lavater and others understood all too well — did not bode well for the future of civilisation.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A Counter-History of Crime FictionThe Rhetoric of Atavism and Degeneration

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
ISBN
978-0-230-59462-3
Pages
145 –155
DOI
10.1057/9780230234536_9
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The dream of being able to read the mind through the body — thus making ‘evil’ legible — has a long history. Physiognomy boasts an ancient lineage that can be traced back to Aristotle, but it was in the eighteenth century that the belief in the correspondence between the outer and inner nature of human beings acquired the status of a pseudo-science and came to play a major role in the European imagination. When the Swiss pastor and theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater authored the influential Physiognomische Fragmente (Essays on Physiognomy, 1775–78), physiognomy was regarded by many as a benign fruit of the Enlightenment despite its racist and anti-Semitic implications. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, however, reacted against Lavater’s attempt to force the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn to convert to Christianity and he also spoke out against Lavater’s conviction that the fixed features of the face may be read as a mirror of the soul. In a pamphlet published in 1778 Lichtenberg famously wrote: ‘If physiognomy becomes what Lavater expects it to become then children will be hanged before they have committed the deeds which deserve the gallows.’1 Physiognomists, in fact, claimed to be able to detect evil tendencies before they had been translated into crime, and this preventive universal judgement — as Lavater and others understood all too well — did not bode well for the future of civilisation.]

Published: Oct 9, 2015

Keywords: Thoroughbred Horse; Lunatic Asylum; Jewish Philosopher; Moral Insanity; Crime Fiction

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