New from Emily Alder of Edinburgh Napier University, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. The focus is on British authors and their relations with science as then understood. Alder appears to be challenging the assumption that such works were all in some way ‘supernatural’ or were an elaboration of ‘the gothic’.
In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland science. In its fin-de-siecle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific discourses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. … Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in materialist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermodynamics and the new physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird. … Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge… [its authors react] to changing ways of understanding generated by scientific exploration, considering how their implications might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews.
It looks like an interesting approach. Here are the contents…
CONTENTS:
* Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siecle.
* Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen.
* Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit.
* Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. [On the ‘occult detectives’ sub-genre].
* Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter.
* Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells.
* Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood.
I have read a couple of pieces by Adler that were worthwhile, but, unless it’s some sort of encyclopedia, I’m not going to pay this publisher’s price for such a slender volume.