Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle

This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle , and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From laboratory experiments, thermodynamics, and Darwinian evolutionary theory to psychology, Theosophy, and the 'new' physics of atoms and forces, science illuminated supernatural realms with rational theories and practices. Changing scientific philosophies and questioning of traditional positivism produced new ways of knowing the world-fertile borderlands for fictional as well as real-world scientists to explore. Reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) as an inaugural weird tale, the author goes on to analyse stories by Arthur Machen, Edith Nesbit, H. G. Wells, William Hope Hodgson, E. and H. Heron, and Algernon Blackwood to show how this radical fantasy mode can be scientific, and how sciences themselves were often already weird.

Chapter 1: Weird tales and scientific borderlands at the fin de siècle. - Part I: Borderlands of Mind, Body, and Spirit. - Chapter2: Weird selves, weird worlds: psychology, ontology, and states of mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen. - Chapter 3: Weird knowledge: experiments, senses, and epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Nesbit. - Chapter 4: Weirdfinders: reality, mastery, and the occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. - Part II: Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter. - Chapter 5: Meat and mould: the weird creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells. - Chapter 6: Weird energies: physics, futures, and the secrets of the universe in Hodgson and Blackwood.