Ailise Bulfin
Dr Ailise Bulfin is a literary and cultural scholar whose research and teaching interests range from nineteenth-century to contemporary culture. Her work explores the dark side of the human imagination, with a particular focus on representations of war, environmental catastrophe and child sexual abuse. She has published a number of critical essays on topics such as xenophobia, invasion scares, sexual violence, natural catastrophe and climate change. Her monograph, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction, was published in 2018 and explores the interchange between popular literature and socio-political anxieties about war and invasion in the period before the First World War. She is co-organiser of the Invasion Network international research group and has worked with its members to produce two special issues of Critical Survey considering the impact of the work of the major invasion fiction author and conspiracist William Le Queux on early-twentieth century fears of war, invasion, spying and sabotage (in press for 2019 & 2020). Her current research entails a medical humanities strand exploring cultural representations of child sexual abuse in nineteenth-century and contemporary culture, and an environmental humanities strand focusing on contemporary representations of climate change and environmental disaster.
She took her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, funded by an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship, and subsequently held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship there from 2014-16. In 2016-17 she was a Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. Her work has been funded by the Irish Research Council, Royal Irish Academy and the Trinity Wellcome Trust ISSF.
Address: School of English, Drama and Film
University College Dublin
She took her PhD at Trinity College Dublin, funded by an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship, and subsequently held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship there from 2014-16. In 2016-17 she was a Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. Her work has been funded by the Irish Research Council, Royal Irish Academy and the Trinity Wellcome Trust ISSF.
Address: School of English, Drama and Film
University College Dublin
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The phenomenon of invasion fiction was intrinsically linked to the complex interplay of historical forces that led to the outbreak of World War I. In the centenary of this cataclysmic event there is a corresponding surge of interest in the culture of the pre-war period. Within this body of work, Gothic Invasions provides for the first time a broad study of the important influence of the prevalent fear of invasion upon popular culture and society at this crucial juncture.
Special Journal Issues by Ailise Bulfin
Articles and Book Chapters by Ailise Bulfin
The effects of non-consensual first experiences of sexual intercourse in women are under studied. This was investigated in 3,857 adult women of whom 6.7% reported ‘persuaded’ first-sex and 0.8% reported forced first-sex. Compared to willing first-sex, both forced and ‘persuaded’ first-sex occurred earlier, involved a greater age difference to the other involved, and were associated with more lifetime sexual partners and some measures of worse psychological well-being. Additionally, ‘persuaded’ first-sex was associated with worse general physical health. ‘Persuaded’ first-sex and its relation to health need to be better understood, along with how culture influences women’s experiences of first-sex.
Striking popular culture images of burnt landscapes, tidal waves and ice-bound cities have the potential to dramatically and emotively convey the dangers of climate change. Given that a significant number of people derive a substantial proportion of their information on the threat of climate change, or the “new human condition”, from popular culture works such as catastrophe movies, it is important that an investigation into the nature of the representations produced be embedded in the attempt to address the issue. What climate change-related messages may be encoded in popular films, television and novels, how are they being received, and what effects may they have? This article adopts the cultural studies perspective that popular culture gives us an important means by which to access the “structures of feeling” that characterise a society at a particular historic juncture: the views held and emotional states experienced by significant amounts of people as evident in disparate forms of cultural production. It further adopts the related viewpoint that popular culture has an effect upon the society in which it is consumed, as well as reflecting that society’s desires and concerns – although the nature of the effect may be difficult to quantify. From this position, the article puts forward a theory on the role of ecological catastrophe narratives in current popular culture, before going on to review existing critical work on ecologically-charged popular films and novels which attempts to assess their effects on their audiences. It also suggests areas for future research, such as the prevalent but little studied theme of natural and environmental disaster in late-Victorian science fiction writing. This latter area is of interest because it reveals the emergence of an ecological awareness or structure of feeling as early as the late-nineteenth century, and allows the relationship of this development to environmental policy making to be investigated because of the historical timeframe. Effectively communicating the threat of climate change and the need to address it, reframing the perspective from a detached and scientifically-articulated problem to one of a human condition – immediate and personal – is on one level a task of narrative, or story-telling, and cultural studies has an important role to play in this and in elucidating the challenges involved.
Chapter in an edited collection about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history.With an afterword by John Sutherland.
This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siècle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including so-called ‘yellow peril’ narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration.
Once popular but now confined to the margins of fin-de-siècle scholarship, Shiel was a writer whose work was characterised by idiosyncratic fictional extrapolations of contemporary scientific and philosophical developments which allowed him to make a minor but distinctive contribution to many of the popular genres taking shape at the fin de siècle. In The Purple Cloud he turned his speculative gaze upon matters temporal to produce a landmark piece of early, dystopian science fiction. Born on the tiny British West Indian island of Montserrat of freed-slave and Anglo-Irish planter origins, Shiel migrated to metropolitan London in 1885 where following an initial foray into literary Decadence he turned to the production of serial fiction for the literary periodicals. Commercially-motivated though these works were they were typically underpinned by the kind of conjecture about the ultimate fate of humanity that pervades The Purple Cloud and out of which stems the text’s articulation of a post-apocalyptic scenario. Though a committed man of science, Shiel was also a deeply, though unconventionally, religious man, the son of a Montserratian Methodist lay-preacher renowned for his oratorical ferocity. Shiel, unlike many of his generation, saw no fundamental conflict between his scientific and religious convictions, drawing heavily on both to inform his fiction. This chapter tracks the impact of contemporary theories of time – geological and philosophical – on The Purple Cloud, arguing that the novel sets up a dialectic of Time and Eternity through which Shiel attempts, in his own inimitable fashion, to negotiate a reconciliation of secular and religious conceptions of the apocalypse.
The gaping chasm left in the literary marketplace by Holmes’s untimely demise inspired many attempts to fill it. One of the less typical of these was by the relatively unknown Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby, whose prototypical international master-criminal character, Dr Nikola, took the world of fiction by storm in the aftermath. In mid-1894, just months after ‘The Final Problem’ ran in December 1893, Boothby was commissioned to write a serial for a new middlebrow periodical, The Windsor Magazine. In this paper, I shall argue that he sought to cash in on the valuable opportunity arising from Holmes’s absence by reworking key Holmesian characteristics, such as impassivity and meticulousness, to define a flagship super-villain character for the Windsor.
Though Nikola did not achieve Holmes’s enduring iconic status, he gained equal popularity in his own time and many contemporary reviewers linked the two characters, as the quote above indicates. Nikola’s lasting legacy, however, is his influence on the international master-criminal trope, which has survived most notably in the villains of Ian Fleming’s still hugely popular Bond offering. Hence through Nikola, Holmes himself, in addition to his renowned nemesis Moriarty, has had a direct and powerful influence on the creation of an oppositional trope that continues to be a staple of popular culture. In elaborating this unlikely link, I shall also explore the notion that given the ambivalence of Holmes’s own personality, and the curiously unresolved endings of many pre-hiatus Holmes stories, this master detective was ripe for transformation into a master-criminal.
corollary was a cause for concern – the technological advance of rivals was to be feared. Not everyone believed in technological progress as inherently beneficial: some worried that it moved too quickly for its full consequences to be understood, others worried about technology falling into the wrong hands. In spite of the general optimism, there was an underlying anxiety about the unchecked development of the machine.
Conferences and Workshops by Ailise Bulfin
Monday 19th June, 6:30-8:00pm in the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. Complimentary tea and coffee provided.
Speakers include:
Hazel Larkin (author, activist, and PhD student), Deirdre Sullivan (award-winning author of Young Adult fiction) & Dr Ailise Bulfin (literary scholar, Maynooth University).
The phenomenon of invasion fiction was intrinsically linked to the complex interplay of historical forces that led to the outbreak of World War I. In the centenary of this cataclysmic event there is a corresponding surge of interest in the culture of the pre-war period. Within this body of work, Gothic Invasions provides for the first time a broad study of the important influence of the prevalent fear of invasion upon popular culture and society at this crucial juncture.
The effects of non-consensual first experiences of sexual intercourse in women are under studied. This was investigated in 3,857 adult women of whom 6.7% reported ‘persuaded’ first-sex and 0.8% reported forced first-sex. Compared to willing first-sex, both forced and ‘persuaded’ first-sex occurred earlier, involved a greater age difference to the other involved, and were associated with more lifetime sexual partners and some measures of worse psychological well-being. Additionally, ‘persuaded’ first-sex was associated with worse general physical health. ‘Persuaded’ first-sex and its relation to health need to be better understood, along with how culture influences women’s experiences of first-sex.
Striking popular culture images of burnt landscapes, tidal waves and ice-bound cities have the potential to dramatically and emotively convey the dangers of climate change. Given that a significant number of people derive a substantial proportion of their information on the threat of climate change, or the “new human condition”, from popular culture works such as catastrophe movies, it is important that an investigation into the nature of the representations produced be embedded in the attempt to address the issue. What climate change-related messages may be encoded in popular films, television and novels, how are they being received, and what effects may they have? This article adopts the cultural studies perspective that popular culture gives us an important means by which to access the “structures of feeling” that characterise a society at a particular historic juncture: the views held and emotional states experienced by significant amounts of people as evident in disparate forms of cultural production. It further adopts the related viewpoint that popular culture has an effect upon the society in which it is consumed, as well as reflecting that society’s desires and concerns – although the nature of the effect may be difficult to quantify. From this position, the article puts forward a theory on the role of ecological catastrophe narratives in current popular culture, before going on to review existing critical work on ecologically-charged popular films and novels which attempts to assess their effects on their audiences. It also suggests areas for future research, such as the prevalent but little studied theme of natural and environmental disaster in late-Victorian science fiction writing. This latter area is of interest because it reveals the emergence of an ecological awareness or structure of feeling as early as the late-nineteenth century, and allows the relationship of this development to environmental policy making to be investigated because of the historical timeframe. Effectively communicating the threat of climate change and the need to address it, reframing the perspective from a detached and scientifically-articulated problem to one of a human condition – immediate and personal – is on one level a task of narrative, or story-telling, and cultural studies has an important role to play in this and in elucidating the challenges involved.
Chapter in an edited collection about selected Victorian texts and authors that in many cases have never before been subject to sustained scholarly attention. Taking inspiration from the pioneeringly capacious approach to the hidden hinterland of Victorian fiction adopted by scholars like John Sutherland and Franco Moretti, this energetically revisionist volume takes advantage of recent large-scale digitisation projects that allow unprecedented access to hitherto neglected literary texts and archives. Blending lively critical engagement with individual texts and close attention to often surprising trends in the production and reception of prose fiction across the Victorian era, this book will be of use to anyone interested in re-evaluating the received meta-narratives of Victorian literary history.With an afterword by John Sutherland.
This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siècle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including so-called ‘yellow peril’ narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration.
Once popular but now confined to the margins of fin-de-siècle scholarship, Shiel was a writer whose work was characterised by idiosyncratic fictional extrapolations of contemporary scientific and philosophical developments which allowed him to make a minor but distinctive contribution to many of the popular genres taking shape at the fin de siècle. In The Purple Cloud he turned his speculative gaze upon matters temporal to produce a landmark piece of early, dystopian science fiction. Born on the tiny British West Indian island of Montserrat of freed-slave and Anglo-Irish planter origins, Shiel migrated to metropolitan London in 1885 where following an initial foray into literary Decadence he turned to the production of serial fiction for the literary periodicals. Commercially-motivated though these works were they were typically underpinned by the kind of conjecture about the ultimate fate of humanity that pervades The Purple Cloud and out of which stems the text’s articulation of a post-apocalyptic scenario. Though a committed man of science, Shiel was also a deeply, though unconventionally, religious man, the son of a Montserratian Methodist lay-preacher renowned for his oratorical ferocity. Shiel, unlike many of his generation, saw no fundamental conflict between his scientific and religious convictions, drawing heavily on both to inform his fiction. This chapter tracks the impact of contemporary theories of time – geological and philosophical – on The Purple Cloud, arguing that the novel sets up a dialectic of Time and Eternity through which Shiel attempts, in his own inimitable fashion, to negotiate a reconciliation of secular and religious conceptions of the apocalypse.
The gaping chasm left in the literary marketplace by Holmes’s untimely demise inspired many attempts to fill it. One of the less typical of these was by the relatively unknown Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby, whose prototypical international master-criminal character, Dr Nikola, took the world of fiction by storm in the aftermath. In mid-1894, just months after ‘The Final Problem’ ran in December 1893, Boothby was commissioned to write a serial for a new middlebrow periodical, The Windsor Magazine. In this paper, I shall argue that he sought to cash in on the valuable opportunity arising from Holmes’s absence by reworking key Holmesian characteristics, such as impassivity and meticulousness, to define a flagship super-villain character for the Windsor.
Though Nikola did not achieve Holmes’s enduring iconic status, he gained equal popularity in his own time and many contemporary reviewers linked the two characters, as the quote above indicates. Nikola’s lasting legacy, however, is his influence on the international master-criminal trope, which has survived most notably in the villains of Ian Fleming’s still hugely popular Bond offering. Hence through Nikola, Holmes himself, in addition to his renowned nemesis Moriarty, has had a direct and powerful influence on the creation of an oppositional trope that continues to be a staple of popular culture. In elaborating this unlikely link, I shall also explore the notion that given the ambivalence of Holmes’s own personality, and the curiously unresolved endings of many pre-hiatus Holmes stories, this master detective was ripe for transformation into a master-criminal.
corollary was a cause for concern – the technological advance of rivals was to be feared. Not everyone believed in technological progress as inherently beneficial: some worried that it moved too quickly for its full consequences to be understood, others worried about technology falling into the wrong hands. In spite of the general optimism, there was an underlying anxiety about the unchecked development of the machine.
Monday 19th June, 6:30-8:00pm in the Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin. Complimentary tea and coffee provided.
Speakers include:
Hazel Larkin (author, activist, and PhD student), Deirdre Sullivan (award-winning author of Young Adult fiction) & Dr Ailise Bulfin (literary scholar, Maynooth University).
Hosted by the Department of History, Lancaster University and supported by the Irish Research Council, this is the second international workshop of the Invasion Network, a group of social and cultural historians, literary scholars, and a range of other specialists and independent researchers working under the broad theme of invasion, with a particular focus on British invasion fears in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. ‘War of the Worlds: Transnational Fears of Invasion and Conflict 1870-1933’ seeks to expand this focus geographically to consider the fear of invasion as a global phenomenon and temporally to take in the period between the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) and the rise of the German Third Reich. We invite papers that consider invasion fears in any region in which the fear became a notable social phenomenon and/or analysing how fears of invasion and future conflict expressed in different nations and regions informed each other. Papers may consider any form of representation – fictional, journalistic, visual, etc. Possible areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- European fears of invasion and future conflict
- U.S. fears of invasion and future conflict
- Fears of invasion in the colonial and quasi-colonial territories of the British empire – including but not limited to Ireland, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, Latin America, South East Asia and coastal China – including the fears of the colonised and the colonisers
- Global concerns about mass migration
- International espionage, secret societies, terrorism and anarchism
- Sinophobia and Russophobia
- Invasion fears in war time (such as Zeppelin scares) and in the interwar period
- The global circulation and reception of invasion texts
- Female authors and readers, and gendered aspects of international invasion fears
The workshop is aimed at all levels of academic scholarship, and we are especially keen to receive paper proposals from postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short biographical note (150 words) to Dr Harry Wood ([email protected]) and Dr Ailise Bulfin ([email protected]) by 31 July 2017. Enquiries also to these addresses.
For more information on the Invasion Network: https://invasionnetwork.wordpress.com/
The workshop brings together William Le Queux scholars from around the world with a view to producing an edited collection of essays offering new thoughts/approaches to Le Queux. Speakers include: Michael Hughes (Lancaster), Anthony Taylor (Sheffield Hallam) and Michael Matin (Warren Wilson).
The keynote address will be delivered by Roger Stearn, whose biographical article ‘The Mysterious Mr Le Queux’ is one of the best examinations of Le Queux’s unusual life. The event is conceived of as a follow-up to ‘Empire in Peril: Invasion-scares and Popular Politics in Britain 1890-1914’, hosted by Queen Mary University of London in November 2013.
https://theconversation.com/the-victorians-portrayed-paedophiles-as-strangers-and-the-myth-persists-today-93810
A visceral doctrine of race hatred, ‘yellow perilism’ held that the ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ races could not co-exist, that the West must take heed or be ‘overrun’. It took shape when European intrusion into China was entering the accelerated phase which culminated in the Boxer Rebellion (1900-01) and when the labour requirements of Britain’s colonies were forcing the mass migration of Chinese indentured labourers across its empire. This paper explores how the pernicious myth also migrated across the empire to its metropolitan centre via migrant British colonial authors who had firsthand experience of Chinese immigration into their home colonies – writers like Dawe, Boothby and Shiel whose popular tales of yellow terror were published in London. It argues that yellow peril fiction can be recast as a type of gothic fiction because its exorbitant depictions of the cruelty and fiendishness of Chinese people bear as little resemblance to reality as its scenarios of oriental invasion bear to the actual state of East-West power relations.
While the factors underpinning the fin-de-siècle gothic revival are multiple, complex and remain the subject of debate, as Roger Luckhurst has recently and convincingly argued, ‘the genre always remains materially tied to the political contexts of its production’ (The Mummy’s Curse (2012), 153). Bearing out this argument is the burgeoning of a subgenre of Egyptian-themed gothic tales in parallel with a long-running crisis in Anglo-Egyptian colonial relations. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869 Egypt became of major strategic importance to the British imperial project and by 1882 Britain had invaded and unofficially occupied Egypt. The controversial and tenuous nature of Britain’s subsequent relationship with Egypt became known as the ‘Egyptian Question’ and caused major diplomatic problems for Britain throughout the fin-de-siècle period. Threats to Britain’s hold on Egypt threatened the smooth operation of the entire empire and emanated from ongoing Egyptian and international opposition to the occupation. Concurrently in the gothic imaginary ancient Egypt turned hostile and from the late 1860s dozens of stories featuring supernatural ancient Egyptian malevolence at work within the borders of the imperial metropolis were published. In plot, they tended to follow a very similar sequence – an ill-fated trip to Egypt, the pillage of an ancient tomb, the unleashing of a curse, and the enactment of revenge in England. This curse-driven plot structure mirrors the political sequence of Britain’s incursion into Egypt, misappropriation of its sovereignty, and corollary fear of damage to the empire arising from Egyptian resistance to the occupation. In addition, the curse plot is typically contained within a framework of easily identifiable references to the modern political difficulties posed by the Egyptian Question. Given that the antagonist of The Beetle is some form of vengeful supernatural entity emanating from an ‘Egyptian den’ of ‘demons’, the text can be numbered among these Egyptian-themed tales and was likely the best-selling of them. Though the identity of Marsh’s Beetle creature is notoriously unstable – its gender, its sexuality, its very humanity all fluctuate – it is unequivocally classified as foreign from the outset and consistently associated with Egypt and North Africa throughout the text. Thus, while a paranoid gothic text like The Beetle can be read as a veritable index of fin-de-siècle anxieties, its engagement with the imperial project and particularly British colonial policy in North Africa forms the focus of this paper.
Until recently the body of Egyptian-themed gothic tales as a whole has been relatively overlooked, but critical attention is honing in on it of late with the recent publication of a couple of survey pieces investigating the subgenre as a whole. To date however no sustained analysis of Marsh’s place within the genre has been undertaken and yet the role of his key, but idiosyncratic, contribution needs to be more fully understood."
At the vanguard of authors so doing was M. P. Shiel, West-Indian migrant to London and influential pioneer of early British science fiction, who produced three lurid novels of oriental invasion. Most successful of these was the 1898 bestseller The Yellow Danger: a xenophobic rant predicting the devastation of Europe by a combined Sino-Japanese invasion force, its first several chapters incorporated aspects of the 1897-8 ‘Far Eastern question’ as they were serialised in a Pearson group magazine. This fictional usage of actual events was not accidental: Shiel and his publishers were acutely aware of public interest in the Chinese crisis and The Yellow Danger was commissioned and plotted to exploit it. Shiel tried to repeat this successful ploy with The Yellow Wave (1905) written and set during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. An utter commercial failure, the topicality of the novel yet confirms the formative effect of troubling Far Eastern events on the fiction of oriental invasion. In fact, contributing to The Yellow Wave’s failure was competition from several other inflated fictionalisations of the war, including George Griffith’s more-speedily issued The Stolen Submarine: A Tale of the Russo-Japanese War (1904).
A Caribbean immigrant to London, Shiel made a minor but distinctive contribution to many of the popular literary genres emerging at the fin de siècle, in particular to the orientalised or ‘yellow peril’ version of the burgeoning future-war science-fiction tale. After an initial foray into literary Decadence, Shiel turned in the late-1890s to ‘the fictional serial trade’, as he put it, to produce popular works in tune with the prevailing sentiment of high imperialism. Most successful of these was 1898 bestseller The Yellow Danger, a xenophobic rant predicting the devastation of Europe by a combined Sino-Japanese invasion force. Its plot was developed in response to a colonial crisis then unfolding in China, which prompted the European scramble for Chinese concessions and contributed to the retaliatory Boxer Rebellion. Its first several chapters incorporated aspects of this crisis as they were issued serially in the C. Arthur Pearson group magazine Short Stories as The Empress of the Earth: The Tale of the Yellow War (5 Feb-18 June 1898). And this tactic was so successful that Pearson twice requested Shiel to lengthen the serial while it was still running.
Shiel’s decision to use the China crisis as the driver for his plot was not accidental: he and his publishers were acutely aware of public interest in it and The Yellow Danger was deliberately written to capitalise on this. As he later explained, when the ‘trouble broke out in China’ in November 1897, Pearson editor, Peter Keary, specifically commissioned him to write a ‘war-serial’ to exploit it. Nor was Shiel the only author to produce such a fictional account of an ongoing foreign conflict. In the late-1890s commissioning editors for serial magazines were keenly aware of the saleability of politically-charged, topical fiction and rushed to market a host of fictional serials about the latest colonial crisis or war while it was still unfolding. In commissioning The Yellow Danger, Keary, for example, was keen to follow up with something similarly topical Louis Tracy’s The Final War (1896), one of the most successful future-war tales of the 1890s. Serialised in Pearson’s Weekly, The Final War extrapolated from ongoing European colonial disputes an allied European attempt to steal Britain’s colonies. Likewise editors of populist papers such as the new Daily Mail were keen to cash in on the interest in colonial affairs, the Mail’s trail-blazing war correspondent, G. W. Steevens, speedily despatching his on-scene reports home by telegraph to an eager mass audience.
By investigating the commissioning and content of Shiel’s war-serials, in parallel with Tracy’s and with Steevens’ foreign reportage, this paper aims to elucidate the role played by the periodical trade in bridging the vast distances of the empire. Not only did it bring accounts of peripheral colonial events directly to those at the centre, it also disseminated them across the empire as colonial periodicals ran reprints of popular metropolitan articles and series. In conclusion, this paper argues that through the exploitative tactics of the periodical trade events that had almost no direct bearing on the day-to-day lives of imperial citizens came to take on a disproportionate importance as colonial crises were sensationalised to create an atmosphere of panic conducive to driving sales.
Exemplary of this group are the then-popular, now-neglected Caribbean Anglo-Irishman M. P. Shiel and the Anglo-Australian Guy Boothby, both hybrid products of the colonial margins who shared a heightened sense of the immediacy of colonial issues. Their popular novels include admonitory texts of retributive colonial invasion resulting in mass metropolitan death, and both predicate this fiction upon contemporary colonial events which had particular resonance for them. Both wrote across the spectrum of popular genres emerging in the fin de siècle, including crime, horror and science fiction, and my research aims to reveal invasion anxiety and colonial concerns as influential in the development of these genres.