Chesterton and His Interlocutors: Dialogical Style and Ethical Debate on Eugenics

Before Nazi Germany's eugenic practices had been completely exposed and denounced, G. K. Chesterton, a British writer best known for his fiction and Roman Catholic apologetics, published Eugenics and Other Evils in 1922. Therein he fiercely opposed eugenics and state sponsored eugenic practices; but his was not an isolated text offered in monologic argument to some vague social menace. In fact, Chesterton never wrote monologically but always in an intrinsically dialogical manner. As this dissertation attempts to demonstrate, this dialogical style, epitomized in the eugenics debate, energized Chesterton's fiction, most notably his novel The Man Who Was Thursday and serves as a way of reading all of Chesterton, his fiction and non-fiction alike.