Cosmic Romance: The Universe in British Fiction, 1885-1930

FAIN: HB-273687-21

Neil Emory Hultgren
California State University, Long Beach Foundation (Long Beach, CA 90840-0004)

Research and writing leading to a book on British speculative fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

A scholarly monograph, Cosmic Romance considers British fiction of the late 19th century and early 20th century that attempts to expand human awareness through a particular kind of narrative. Cosmic romances challenge conceptions of literary realism and the everyday via estranged points of view and representations of time that exceed the human lifespan. Cosmic Romance breaks new ground by bringing a study of narrative technique to popular British speculative fiction that explored increasingly complex notions of the space and time of the universe. My research is also unique in examining popular fiction’s eclectic power as it synthesized disparate discourses of the period: mystical writings stemming from new hybrid religions, popular representations of scientific discoveries in astronomy and physics, as well as pseudoscientific treatises on eugenics.

Associated Products

Unpopular Revisions of Romance: Arthur Machen Reimagines the 1890s (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Unpopular Revisions of Romance: Arthur Machen Reimagines the 1890s
Author: Neil Hultgren
Abstract: This paper brings together strains of decadence studies and postcolonial studies to explore the evolution of one strand of the romance genre after the end of the Victorian Period. Arthur Machen made his reputation by publishing two extravagantly non-realist works as part of John Lane’s decadent Keynote series: The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894) and The Three Imposters (1895). At the time of their publication, these two book-length works sat, intriguingly, on the border of decadence and popular romance, such that they gestured simultaneously towards Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), an example of decadent romance, and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886-87), part of the late-Victorian romance revival championed by Andrew Lang. I contend that Machen revised his conception of romance via his fiction and non-fictional output published in the journal The Academy between June 1907 and August 1908. Machen’s eclectic non-fiction contributions to the Academy highlighted intersections among the romance form, Christian ritual, paganism, and mysticism, while fictional sketches chronicled the adventures of Ambrose Meyrick, a Welsh schoolboy who becomes a martyr in a quest for the holy grail. Meyrick later became the protagonist of Machen’s 1922 romance, The Secret Glory. Drawing on recent Machen scholarship by Aaron Worth, Stefania Forlini, and Alex Murray as well as scholarship on decadence by Matthew Potolsky and Dennis Denisoff, I argue that Machen’s twentieth-century writings, though conservative in their political affiliation, reoriented the relationship between the romance form and the British empire.
Date: 11/11/2023
Primary URL: https://www.navsa2023.com/program
Primary URL Description: Conference Program for the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference of 2023
Secondary URL: https://www.navsa2023.com/program
Conference Name: NAVSA 2023: Revision, Return, Reform

H. G. Wells, the Short Story Form, and Realism (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: H. G. Wells, the Short Story Form, and Realism
Author: Neil Hultgren
Abstract: This paper examines H. G. Wells’s use of the short story form as a site for narrative experiment, and considers the overlap between insights of recent scholars analyzing the narrative structure of the Victorian realist novel and the insights derived from Wells’s demonstrably non-realist short fiction. Starting in the mid-1890s and continuing alongside both his famous scientific romances such as The Time Machine (1895) and his social and political novels such as Kipps (1905) and Ann Veronica (1909), Wells was a prolific publisher of short stories who made use of the glut of cheap, illustrated periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to try his hand at a multitude of fictional forms. I emphasize the importance of reading Wells’s stories on their own as romances while also recognizing, with critic Rachel Bowser, that Wells’s scientific romances can comment on “the aesthetic parameters that make a realist novel recognizable as such.” While Bowser focuses her attention on the depiction of interiority in Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), I explore the manner in which Wells’s shorter fiction, particularly two stories, “Under the Knife” and “The Stolen Body,” offer critical portraits of one of the hallmarks of realist writing, the omniscient or semi-omniscient narrator. Both “Under the Knife” (1896) and “The Stolen Body” (1898) depict out-of-body experiences, one through a surgical procedure and the other through an attempt at “thought transference,” and, in the process of imagining these speculative states, literalize the detached perspective of the realist novel’s omniscient narrator. I connect the insights from these two tales to critical interventions about realism by critics Audrey Jaffe and George Levine and consider the early Wells as an unlikely theorist of realism.
Date: 10/20/2023
Primary URL: http://www.visawus.org/visawus-conference-2023/
Primary URL Description: Conference website for the 2023 Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Conference. I can provide a pdf of the conference program upon request.
Conference Name: VISAWUS 2023: Victorian Elements

William Hope Hodgson’s Dark Nebula, or, Stars—They’re Just Like Us (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: William Hope Hodgson’s Dark Nebula, or, Stars—They’re Just Like Us
Abstract: This panel explores fundamental questions of what the world beyond the earth—taken broadly to mean the Sun, planets and satellites of the solar system, as well as the distant stars and nebulae beyond the solar system—enabled Victorian artists, scientists, or historians to think about, know, and imagine. What styles and rhetorics developed around how the Victorians discussed, represented, and studied the world outside of earth, including the sublime and also transcending it?
Author: Neil Hultgren
Date: 01/27/2023
Location: Virtual (via zoom)
Primary URL: n/a

Remnants of Victorian Imperial Reprisal in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Remnants of Victorian Imperial Reprisal in William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land
Author: Neil Hultgren
Abstract: This paper examines William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel, The Night Land, which combined horror with aspects of early science fiction to depict humanity’s heroic struggle to protect itself from extra-dimensional monsters millions of years in the future. I explore how imperialist conceptions of race shape Hodgson’s representation of monstrosity and horror. I draw on John Peck’s historical study of the British military in Victorian literature and his idea that the siege—a scene in which British soldiers must defend their community from racialized “others” in a foreign country—was fundamental to the way that British fiction and journalism represented Britain’s imperial military conflicts in the late nineteenth century. Emphasis on the siege occluded the actual material circumstances of imperialism, making it seem that the British were under threat by foreign invaders when, in fact, sieges resulted because British forces attempted to control and occupy territories outside of Europe. I read The Night Land alongside Hodgson’s story, “Jack Grey, Second Mate” (1917), in which a heroic second mate defends a white, British female passenger on his vessel from the violent advances of Mr. Pathan (a villain whose name designates his Afghan or Iranian descent). Expanding on the scholarship of Christopher Herbert, I highlight how Victorian imperialist tropes and conceptions of non-white people—many of them resonant with reports of the British reprisals that followed the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion—shaped the development of SF and horror in early twentieth-century fiction such as The Night Land. Though critics Carl H. Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock have argued that racism and xenophobia around immigration are crucial to our understanding of the stories of American horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft, my paper contends that nineteenth-century British imperial orientations of the racial “other” in the siege narrative also influenced the development of weird fiction in Britain.
Date: 10/01/2022
Primary URL: https://navsa2022.org
Primary URL Description: Conference website for the 2022 Conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association, Just Victorians.
Secondary URL: https://navsa2022.org/program/
Secondary URL Description: Link to the PDF of the Conference program.
Conference Name: NAVSA 2022: Just Victorians

M. P. Shiel's Multiple Identities (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: M. P. Shiel's Multiple Identities
Author: Neil Hultgren
Abstract: Because this was a roundtable, abstracts were not required.
Date: 01/05/2023
Primary URL: https://mla.confex.com/mla/2023/meetingapp.cgi/Session/15189
Primary URL Description: MLA Convention Panel website for Panel 86: Caribbean Studies and Victorian Studies.
Conference Name: MLA 2023 Convention

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