Genealogies of Genius

The essays in this volume seek to examine the uses to which concepts of genius have been put in different cultures and times. Collectively, they are designed to make two new statements. First, seen in historical and comparative perspective, genius is not a natural fact and universal human constant that has been only recently identified by modern science, but instead a categorical mode of assessing human ability and merit. Second, as a concept with specific definitions and resonances, genius has performed specific cultural work within each of the societies in which it had a historical presence.

1. Introduction; Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon
2. The Problem of Genius in the Age of Slavery; Joyce E. Chaplin
3. Genius vs Democracy: Excellence and Singularity in Post-Revolution France; Nathalie Heinich
4. Equality, Inequality, and Difference: Genius as Problem and Possibility in American Political/Scientific Discourse; John S. Carson
5. Genius and Obsession: Do You Have to Be Mad to Be Smart?; Lennard Davis
6. Inspiration to Perspiration: Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius in Victorian Context; Janet Browne
7. 'Genius must do the scullery work of the world': New Women, Feminists and Genius, circa 1880-1920; Lucy Delap
8. The Cult of the Genius in Germany and Austria at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century; Julia Barbara Köhne
9. Cultivating Genius in a Bolshevik Country; Irina Sirotkina
10. Insight in the Age of Automation; David Bates
11. Genius and Evil; Darrin M. McMahon

Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University, USA. She is the author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius and co-author of The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus.

Darrin M. McMahon is the Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History at Dartmouth College, USA. He is the author of Divine Fury: A History of Genius; Happiness: A History, and the co-editor of Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History.