The Modernist Abominations of William Hope Hodgson

Abstract

Some of the most innovative works of fiction in the British anti-realist tradition can be found amongst popular genres — Gothic Horror, sensation fiction, science fiction — at the fin de siecle. Strongly influenced by such scientific and sociomedical discourses as evolutionism, degeneration theory, and psychology, fin-de-siecle popular literature challenged traditional conceptions of human identity at every level: by theorising human species identity as both hybridised and metamorphic (H. G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Dr Moreau John Buchan’s 1898 No-Man’s-Land’); in its representations of an admixed, fluctuable, even chaotic human body (M. P. Shiel’s 1895 ‘Huguenin’s Wife’, Richard Marsh’s 1897 The Beetle); in its speculations on the incoherence of a human subjectivity fractured by the unconscious (Joseph Hocking’s 1890 The Weapons of Mystery Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1894 The Parasite). The innovation of such texts does not merely consist in thematic treatments of a dangerously unstable human identity. They engage in narrative experimentation more consistently than their mainstream contemporary counterparts within the realist or naturalist tradition, foregrounding issues of narrativity, refusing to lay claim to narrative objectivity or omniscience, renouncing verisimilitude and narrative logic in favour of the production of sensation and affect.