an obsession with spiritualism, engaging with the spirit of his long dead mother. in 1892, max nordau, an expatriate hungarian living in paris, published his extraordinary bestseller degeneration, which greatly extended the concepts of bénédict morel and cesare lombroso (to whom he dedicated the book) to the entire civilization of western europe, and transformed the medical connotations of degeneration into a generalized cultural criticism. adopting some of charcot's neurological vocabulary, nordau identified a number of weaknesses in contemporary western culture which he characterized in terms of ego-mania, i.e., narcissism and hysteria. he also emphasized the importance of fatigue, enervation and ennui. nordau, horrified by the anti-semitism surrounding the dreyfus affair, devoted his later years to zionist politics. degeneration theory fell from favour around the time of the first world war because of an improved understanding of the mechanisms of genetics as well as the increasing vogue for psychoanalytic thinking. however, some of its preoccupations lived on in the world of eugenics and social darwinism. it is notable that the nazi attack on western liberal society was largely couched in terms of degenerate art with its associations of racial miscegenation and fantasies of racial purity—and included as its target almost all modernist cultural experiment. the role of women in furthering development of the concept of degeneration was reviewed by anne mcclintock, a professor of english at the university of wisconsin, who found that women who were ambiguously placed on the so-called "imperial divide" (nurses, nannies, governesses, prostitutes and servants) happened to serve as boundary markers and mediators. these women were tasked with the purification and maintenance of boundaries and what was seen as "inferior" places in society they held at the time. degenerationist devices pornocrates by félicien rops (1878) towards the close of the 19th century, in the fin-de-siècle period, something of an obsession with decline, descent and degeneration invaded the european creative imagination, partly fuelled by widespread misconceptions of darwinian evolutionary theory. among the main examples are the symbolist literary work of charles baudelaire, the rougon-macquart novels of émile zola, robert louis stevenson's strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde—published in the same year (1886) as richard von krafft-ebing's psychopathia sexualis—and, subsequently, oscar wilde's only novel (containing his aesthetic manifesto) the picture of dorian gray (1891). in tess of the d'urbervilles (1891), thomas hardy explores the destructive consequences of a family myth of noble ancestry. norwegian dramatist henrik ibsen showed a sensitivity to degenerationist thinking in his theatrical presentations of scandinavian domestic crises. arthur machen's the great god pan (1890/1894), with its emphasis on the horrors of psychosurgery, is frequently cited as an essay on degeneration. a scientific twist was added by h.g. wells in the time machine (1895) in which wells prophesied the splitting of the human race into variously degenerate forms, and again in his the island of doctor moreau (1896) wherein forcibly mutated animal-human hybrids keep reverting to their earlier forms. joseph conrad alludes to degeneration theory in his treatment of political radicalism in the 1907 novel the secret agent. in her influential study the gothic body, kelly hurley draws attention to the literary device of the abhuman as a representation of damaged personal identity, and to lesser-known authors in the field, including richard marsh (1857–1915), author of the beetle (1897), and william hope hodgson (1877–1918), author of the boats of the glen carrig, the house on the borderland and the night land. in 1897, bram stoker published dracula, an enormously influential gothic novel featuring the parasitic vampire count dracula in an extended exercise of reversed imperialism. unusually, stoker makes explicit reference to the writings of lombroso and nordau in the course of the novel. arthur conan doyle's sherlock holmes stories include a host of degenerationist tropes, perhaps best illustrated (drawing on the ideas of serge voronoff) in the adventure of the creeping man.