This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian im... more This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.
I examine the proliferation of the concept of the vortex in the decadent fiction of M. P. Shiel i... more I examine the proliferation of the concept of the vortex in the decadent fiction of M. P. Shiel in relation to fiction's ability and inability to represent human consciousness and its limits. I think through the way that Shiel's fascination with Edgar Allan Poe influenced his literary vortexes, the significance of Shiel's fiction in relation to vortical developments in physics in the late nineteenth century, and the impact of the vortex on Shiel's engagement with whiteness and racial difference.
Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915, 2018
This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian im... more This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.
This paper surveys a selection of criticism of H. Rider Haggard, late Victorian British writer of... more This paper surveys a selection of criticism of H. Rider Haggard, late Victorian British writer of imperial romances known for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). In a period spanning from 1980 to the present, Haggard criticism has evinced a continued interest in issues of gender and imperialism. This fascination was to a great extent influenced by the popularity of postcolonial criticism after 1985. While works by Wendy Katz and Norman Etherington show that earlier discussions of imperialism in Haggard were motivated by debates about Haggard’s status as an author and the literary value of his works, subsequent publications beginning in the late 1980s highlight the complicated and often ambivalent nature of Haggard’s relationship with imperial discourse. As multiple critics from the 1990s have shown, Haggard’s works, whether understood in relation to the literary culture of the imperial capital or the colonized spaces of South Africa, often reflect anxieties about Britain’s i...
This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian im... more This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.
I examine the proliferation of the concept of the vortex in the decadent fiction of M. P. Shiel i... more I examine the proliferation of the concept of the vortex in the decadent fiction of M. P. Shiel in relation to fiction's ability and inability to represent human consciousness and its limits. I think through the way that Shiel's fascination with Edgar Allan Poe influenced his literary vortexes, the significance of Shiel's fiction in relation to vortical developments in physics in the late nineteenth century, and the impact of the vortex on Shiel's engagement with whiteness and racial difference.
Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915, 2018
This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian im... more This chapter analyses Richard Marsh’s 1900 novel The Goddess in relation to the late-Victorian imperial Gothic mode of writing. It suggests that Marsh’s novel demystifies the occult and supernatural aspects of the imperial Gothic through its depiction of a mechanical goddess. Marsh’s goddess is notable because she is not a supernatural being but an automaton, an example of ‘clockwork machinery’ set in violent motion by the novel’s criminal antagonist. Marsh’s novel looks back to Tipu’s tiger, a late-eighteenth-century automaton from Mysore, India, which enacted the death of an Englishman by a tiger. Marsh recalls Indian violence against the English through a fictional reimagining of the tiger, a familiar museum piece, as a goddess. The exposure of the goddess’s machinery is a shocking aesthetic strategy that strips the imperial Gothic of its veil of mysticism and, through a negotiation of the plot machinery of the fantastic, interrogates imperial Gothic conventions.
This paper surveys a selection of criticism of H. Rider Haggard, late Victorian British writer of... more This paper surveys a selection of criticism of H. Rider Haggard, late Victorian British writer of imperial romances known for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). In a period spanning from 1980 to the present, Haggard criticism has evinced a continued interest in issues of gender and imperialism. This fascination was to a great extent influenced by the popularity of postcolonial criticism after 1985. While works by Wendy Katz and Norman Etherington show that earlier discussions of imperialism in Haggard were motivated by debates about Haggard’s status as an author and the literary value of his works, subsequent publications beginning in the late 1980s highlight the complicated and often ambivalent nature of Haggard’s relationship with imperial discourse. As multiple critics from the 1990s have shown, Haggard’s works, whether understood in relation to the literary culture of the imperial capital or the colonized spaces of South Africa, often reflect anxieties about Britain’s i...
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