Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature

Abstract

Experiments in Life-Writing Intersections of Auto/ Biography and Fiction y Covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures Sheds light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation and innovation in modern Europe y Features an interview with award-winning biographical novelist Janice Galloway This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). [...] Contents Introduction; Lucia Boldrini and Julia Lajta-Novak.-1. Ford Madox Ford and Modernist Experiments in Biography; Max Saunders.-2. Beckettian Tone versus Narrated Memory in B.S. Johnson's Trawl; Andy Wimbush.-3. Journeys of Discovery in Jackie Kay's Red Dust Road; Pietra Palazzolo.

Genres of Conspiracy in Nineteenth-Century British Writing

“…Whately's argument is in fact ironic, intended both as a satire upon David Hume's argument against the historical truth of Jesus's miracles in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and more pointedly against the excesses of British print media (Carver 2017). Its interest in historians of conspiracy culture is therefore in its deployment of humour in the presentation of a conspiracy theory, and as a counterexample to the historical claim that conspiracy narratives circulated first only among credulous readers / listeners, and only later acquired an ironic, playful dimension.…”

Uchronia

“…Carver, whose excellent new book also considers topics ranging from evolutionary theory to the prospect of life on other planets, views nineteenth-century alternate histories as "a means to reflect on how scientific, cultural, and historical discoveries altered the understanding of the past." 4 Future work in Victorian studies will no doubt explore traces of the uchronian imagination in a wide variety of modes and genres. The scientific romance, certainly: Genie Babb, for instance, has classified H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, The Sleeper Awakes, and In the Days of the Comet (along with William Morris's News from Nowhere) as "future uchronias," while describing A Modern Utopia, with its conceit of a parallel Earth, as a blend of the "alternate history" and "parallel worlds" tropes.…”