@article{924485,
      note = {Includes index.},
      author = {Alder, Emily.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/924485},
      title = {Weird fiction and science at the Fin de Siècle /},
      abstract = {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 Stevensons 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. Dr Emily Alder is Lecturer in Literature and  Culture at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, UK, and  a member of the RSE Young Academy of Scotland. She is  Editor of the journal Gothic Studies, and co-editor of  Gothic Science Fiction, 1980-2010 (2011). This is her first  book. This essential book combines astute literary analysis  with scientific historicism, making an important case for  the need to read speculative realism through  nineteenth-century developments in biology, physics,  psychology and spiritualism. Rather than reduce the work of  key exponents like H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood,  Edith Nesbit or William Hope Hodgson to a mere cultural  mirror, Alder shows how both science and weird fiction need  to be understood as comparable responses to significant  changes in conceptions of time, space and being that shaped  the modern world. Xavier Aldana Reyes, Reader in English  Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan University.},
      recid = {924485},
      pages = {1 online resource (x, 250 pages) :},
}