Fictions Of Loss In The Victorian Fin De Si Cle

It has been widely recognised that British culture in the 1880s and 1890s was marked by a sense of irretrievable decline. Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle explores the ways in which that perception of loss was cast into narrative, into archetypal stories which sought to account for the culture's troubles and perhaps assuage its anxieties. Stephen Arata pays close attention to fin de siècle representation of three forms of decline - national, biological and aesthetic - and reveals how late Victorian degeneration theory was used to 'explain' such decline. By examining a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Symonds to Conan Doyle and Stoker - Arata shows how the nation's twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period. His account offers new insights for students and scholars of the fin de siècle.

Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

Fin-de-Siècle Fictions, 1890s- 1990s focuses on fin-de-siècle British and postmodern American fictions of apocalypse and investigates the ways in which these narratives demonstrate shifts in the relations among modern discourses of power and knowledge.

In this fascinating book, Reid examines Robert Louis Stevenson's writings in the context of late-Victorian evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in 'primitive' life is at the heart of his work. She investigates a wide range of Stevenson's writing, including Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island as well as previously unpublished material from the Stevenson archive at Yale. Reid's interpretation offers a new way of understanding the relationship between his Scottish and South Seas work. Her analysis of Stevenson's engagement with anthropological and psychological debate also illuminates the dynamic intersections between literature and science at the fin de siècle.

Study of malaria in literature and culture illuminates the legacies of nineteenth-century colonial medicine within narratives of illness.

This is the first major full-length study of Victorian Gothic fiction. Combining original readings of familiar texts with a rich store of historical sources, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction is an historicist survey of nineteenth-century Gothic writing--from Dickens to Stoker, Wilkie Collins to Conan Doyle, through European travelogues, sexological textbooks, ecclesiastic histories and pamphlets on the perils of self-abuse. Critics have thus far tended to concentrate on specific angles of Gothic writing (gender or race), or the belief that the Gothic 'returned' at the so-called fin de siècle. Robert Mighall, by contrast, demonstrates how the Gothic mode was active throughout the Victorian period, and provides historical explanations for its development from late eighteenth century, through the 'Urban Gothic' fictions of the mid-Victorian period, the 'Suburban Gothic' of the Sensation vogue, through to the somatic horrors of Stevenson, Machen, Stoker, and Doyle at the century's close. Mighall challenges the psychological approach to Gothic fiction which currently prevails, demonstrating the importance of geographical, historical, and discursive factors that have been largely neglected by critics, and employing a variety of original sources to demonstrate the contexts of Gothic fiction and explain its development in the Victorian period.

In Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the 'romance revival' of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Rather than treating these stories as Victorian Gothic, Daly locates them as part of a 'popular modernism'. Drawing on work in cultural studies, this book argues that the vampires, mummies and treasure hunts of these adventure narratives provided a form of narrative theory of cultural change, at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the 'new imperialism', the rise of professionalism, and the expansion of consumerist culture. Daly's wide-ranging study argues that the presence of a genre such as romance within modernism should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

Visiting late Victorian debates about the morality of literature, this book reconsiders the ways in which novels engender an ethical orientation or response in their readers, explaining how the intersections of nation, family, and form in the late realist English novel produce a new ethics of hospitality.