Scientific fictions: Evolutionary science, literary genre, and theories of degeneration in fin de siecle Britain

This dissertation analyzes the generic literary manifestations of a pervasive cultural thematic in the 1890s---evolutionary theories of physical and moral degeneration. Throughout, I address a critical absence in literary scholarship on evolutionary discourses of degeneration: that of genre. I argue that one must consider late-Victorian literary forms in order to understand scientific discourses of degeneracy in the British fin de siecle period. Evolutionary discourses of degeneracy structured how people viewed the nature of society, its past, and its future direction. And as a literary form primarily concerned with the construction of narrative, the novel was uniquely positioned as the type of literature that could most thoroughly engage with these broader issues of social and scientific change. Most studies of fin de siecle fiction and degeneration tend to focus either on the institutional and repressive mobilization of degenerationist discourse (Greenslade 1994; Arata 1996) or are an in-depth study of one particular genre (Hurley 1996; Richarson 2003). However, I argue that evolutionary notions of degeneration were far from monolithic or strictly institutional in nature, and that considering the formal and narrative boundaries of literary genre in a comparative context is necessary for seeing the discursive instability of evolution and degeneration in late-Victorian culture. By doing so, we can see the crucial role fiction played in articulating the important social and scientific issues of the time, and how late-nineteenth century evolutionary science was not something separate from literary culture, but a vital part of it.; Each chapter focuses on a fin-de-siecle literary genre and the novels' textual and discursive relationship to scientific discourses of degeneration. My first chapter analyzes the controversy over the New Woman novel and that debate's relationship to sexological constructions of deviant female sexuality by comparing Mona Caird's feminist novel The Daughters of Danaus and Horace Bleackley's anti-feminist novel Une Culotte. My second chapter focuses on William Morris' utopian novel News from Nowhere and how Morris' vision of revolution is explicitly structured around evolutionary notions of nature. My third chapter argues that H. G. Well's scientific romance The Time Machine uses fictional form to educate the reader in scientific principles and methods. My last chapter focuses on George Gissing's ambiguous relationship to naturalism by analyzing In the Year of Jubilee's reliance on scientific characterizations of individuals and groups in Gissing's figuration of literary character.