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Books by Ailise Bulfin

The monograph Gothic Invasions introduces the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century phenome... more The monograph Gothic Invasions introduces the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century phenomenon of invasion fiction. This was a paranoid literary development that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1890 and 1914. From nightmare visions of restless Egyptian mummies stalking London streets to hordes of Oriental barbarians sacking Europe’s capitals to stomping Prussians occupying British cities, the popular fiction of fin-de-siècle Britain teemed with images of invasion. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to fears concerning the downside of Britain’s continuing imperial expansion:– fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the empire and were expressed in narratives that draw strongly upon and reciprocally transform the conventions and themes of Gothic writing. The first part of the book explores texts that represented invasion fears in the form of the Gothic’s familiar monsters:– vampires, demons and mummies. The second part considers the extension of the theme into the genres of crime, yellow peril and military invasion fiction where it informed the development of staple figures like the foreign criminal, the oriental villain and the brutish Prussian soldier.
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.

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Special Journal Issues by Ailise Bulfin

Co-edited by Ailise Bulfin and Harry Wood. Two related special editions on the alarmist popular a... more Co-edited by Ailise Bulfin and Harry Wood. Two related special editions on the alarmist popular author, journalist, and amateur spy William Le Queux and his relationship to the culture of the period before, during and after the First World War. The aim is to assess the reciprocal relationship between Le Queux’s fictional and propaganda texts and contemporary social concerns, particularly those surrounding urban decay, Russian tsarism, invasion and spying. The special editions are based on the findings an interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2015 at Trinity College Dublin, entitled 'Master of Misinformation: William Le Queux, Invasion Scares and Spy Fever, 1880-1930' organised by the Invasion Network.

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Articles and Book Chapters by Ailise Bulfin

Gothic Studies, 2021

This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contempo... more This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary children's and young adult gothic works, focusing on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events and Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. It argues that because of the upsetting nature of the issue and the numerous myths surrounding it, cultural production often uses the gothic figure of the monster who preys on children to address CSA indirectly, and identifies this strategy in the above series. It reveals a distinctly sexual charge to the monsters' victimisation of the children in both sets of narratives and explores their tendency to perpetuate CSA myths such as that of the perpetrator as a monstrous stranger. In conclusion, it considers how these narratives also challenge CSA myths and offer models of resilient child survivors, and it draws on cognitive cultural theory to theorise potential reader/viewer responses. Through its metaphorical imbrication of real-world brutality and dark fantasy, the Gothic is ultimately theorised as potentially affording more scope than realist treatments for touching on issues of transgression for wider and younger audiences, and sometimes in affirmative ways that move beyond merely recirculating myths and panic.

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021

In the late-nineteenth century the origins of the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA) star... more In the late-nineteenth century the origins of the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA) started to emerge in a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children, especially in the new science of sexology. The concept was also shaped in sensational journalism and popular fiction which dramatically exploited the medico-legal theories in works that reached a wide audience. Within this set of overlapping discourses, this article identifies the developing characterisation of the abuser, or ‘paedophile’, as an outsider or stranger in order to provide distance from the uncomfortable reality that CSA is typically perpetrated by family members or others well known to the victims. The article also argues that much writing about sexual harm to children, including the factual treatments, often drew on the dark metaphors of gothic writing to avoid addressing this difficult subject explicitly. In this way the figure of the monster came to stand in for the perpetrator of sexual crimes against children, with the result that the paedophile was portrayed not just as a social outsider, but as a monstrous stranger – creating a persistent, detrimental myth which kept social attention away from the most common types of abuse.

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‘Associations between forced and “persuaded” first intercourse and later health outcomes in women’, co-authored with McCarthy-Jones, S., Nixon, E., O’Keane, V., Bacik, I., & McElvaney, R

Violence Against Women, 2018

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801218793223 The effects of non-consensual first exp... more https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1077801218793223
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.

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Global and Planetary Change, Special Humanities issue: The New Human Condition and Climate Change: Humanities and Social Science Perceptions of Threat, 156 (Sept 2017): 140–6., 2017

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818116303307 Striking popular culture ... more https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818116303307
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.

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Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915: Re-reading the fin de siècle, ed. by Victoria Margree, Daniel Orrells and Minna Vuohelainen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018); Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century series.

This chapter presents a sustained analysis of the relationship between Richard Marsh’s bestsellin... more This chapter presents a sustained analysis of the relationship between Richard Marsh’s bestselling novel of Egyptian malevolence, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), and a subgenre of Gothic Egyptian fiction which developed partially in response to contentious Anglo-Egyptian political relations. Marsh began writing his novel in 1895, the same year General Herbert Kitchener launched his famous and ultimately successful campaign to quell Islamic-nationalist rebellion in northern Sudan, then indirectly under Anglo-Egyptian control. This chapter exposes the links between the novel and the politics, placing The Beetle precisely within the context of Anglo-Egyptian and Sudanese conflict, rather than broadly reading it against general imperial concerns, and thereby providing a fuller picture of both the remarkable revival of the Gothic literary mode at the fin de siècle and the society in which this literary phenomenon occurred. This chapter also reveals how Marsh’s text dramatically exceeded Gothic Egyptian genre conventions in its emphasis on pagan as well as colonial monstrosity.

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Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon, ed. by Daragh Downes and Trish Ferguson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series, 2016

This chapter reads key works by fin-de-siècle popular author Richard Marsh in light of recent bio... more This chapter reads key works by fin-de-siècle popular author Richard Marsh in light of recent biographical discoveries about him, focusing on his best-selling late-Victorian gothic novels The Devil’s Diamond (1893), The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901). It uncovers the impact of Marsh’s checkered early career upon the accounts of criminality and social precariousness that underpin the horror in these texts, arguing that Marsh’s experience manifests in incongruous moments of realism which disrupt the texts’ gothic modality. The chapter contributes to the ongoing critical rediscovery of Marsh, largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, providing new insights into his work and into the complex interaction between two prominent Victorian literary modes, the realist and the gothic.

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.

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Literature Compass, 12:9 (Sep 2015): 482-96.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lic3.12253 This article introduces readers to t... more https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/lic3.12253
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.

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Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Vol 20, No 1 (2015): Special issue: The Victorians and China

By the end of the nineteenth century the pernicious racial term “yellow peril” had entered the co... more By the end of the nineteenth century the pernicious racial term “yellow peril” had entered the common parlance of Victorians across the British Empire. Ironically, this insidious imperial myth that China would overrun the West owed its genesis to the impact of European, and particularly British imperial activity, on China in the late-nineteenth century, rather than to any expansionary Chinese aims or activity. The western impact was bi-faceted, involving both the physical incursion of westerners into China, and the related movement of Chinese people overseas to work in western nations and colonies. Under the international coerced labour phenomenon known as the “coolie trade,” Chinese people were brought across the British Empire as far as the settler colonies of Australia and South Africa, and even to the plantations of the British West Indies. Despite the relative powerlessness of their position as indentured or indebted immigrants, they were inevitably perceived as hostile aliens who threatened "white" society. This essay examines the impact of Australian anti-Chinese sentiment on representations of Chinese people in the works of Guy Boothby, an Adelaide-born author who emigrated to London in 1893. It explores Boothby’s representations of Chinese people in the imperial spaces of Britain’s Australian and Southeast Asian colonies, and also in the informal imperial spaces of contact in “foreign” China, in the cities and coastal locations where the British Empire was making its presence and influence felt, in works including Boothby’s travelogue, On the Wallaby (1894), the Dr Nikola series of novels (1895-1901), “The Story of Lee Ping” (1895), The Beautiful White Devil (1896) and My Strangest Case (1901). It argues that these superficially disinterested but consistently derogatory representations of the far-flung Chinese contributed to the deplorable international myth of the yellow peril, but also could not help revealing the important and largely overlooked presence of the Chinese in the spaces of the British Empire, demonstrating the impact of the coolie trade on imperial society and signalling the multifaceted nature of the British Empire’s involvement with China.

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Critical Survey, Special Edition: Victorian Literature and Science, 27:2 (Summer 2015).

This article explores late Victorian fictions of natural catastrophe and their relationship to co... more This article explores late Victorian fictions of natural catastrophe and their relationship to contemporary developments in the natural sciences. During this era, popular culture had become saturated with an 'apocalyptic imaginary' – a myriad of images of degeneration, total war and the fall of civilisation. While the majority of popular catastrophe texts turn on disasters of a man-made, military nature, including global wars, nationalist uprisings, and domestic revolutions, a significant subset employ natural disaster as the means of catastrophe – some dramatising the astronomical theories of cometary collision or the heat death of the sun, and others postulating meteorological and geological disasters such as volcanic eruption, earthquake, fog, ice, flood, and even climate change. These include H.G. Wells and George Griffith's tales of comet strike, M.P. Shiel and Grant Allen's volcano tales, and William Delisle Hay, Robert Barr and Fred M. White's accounts of deadly fog. This article relates this little-known body of texts to developing Victorian concerns about the sustainability of human life on earth, arguing that by focusing on determining the causes of the catastrophes depicted it is possible to see links emerging between 'natural' catastrophe and human activity in Victorian thinking and hence the development of an ecological awareness.

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Jan 1, 2011

This article is an examination of the relationship between the development of Egyptian-themed got... more This article is an examination of the relationship between the development of Egyptian-themed gothic fiction and Anglo-Egyptian colonial relations in the late-Victorian period. It argues that the increasingly pivotal role played by the Suez Canal in the smooth operation of the British Empire was a key impetus for the emergence of this paranoid body of literature. Since its completion in 1869, the canal had quickly become the lifeline of the empire, with Britain unofficially occupying Egypt in 1882 to ensure unrestricted access. The unstable status of Egypt following this move quickly became an ongoing source of national and international controversy, commonly known as ‘the Egyptian Question’, which was to plague British foreign policy over the ensuing decades. And contemporaneously a subgenre of Egyptian-themed gothic fiction began to grow in popularity, within which concerns over the Egyptian situation tended to find fictional expression in the form of the supernatural invader. From the canal’s opening in 1869, and gaining further momentum after the 1882 occupation, dozens of tales positing the irruption of vengeful, supernatural, ancient Egyptian forces in civilised, rational, modern England began to appear. The most extreme of these is Pharos the Egyptian (1899), a narrative of retributive mass extermination by the Anglo-Australian author Guy Boothby. The theme recurs in texts by other notable fin-de-siècle popular authors such as Bram Stoker, Richard Marsh, and Arthur Conan Doyle, and in a host of lesser-known short stories, signalling clearly that the significance of the Egyptian Question was not lost on popular authors or their audiences. The article reads these fictional narratives contrapuntally alongside popular non-fictional accounts of Anglo-Egyptian affairs, such as those of prominent Daily Mail foreign correspondent G. W. Steevens, to allow the reciprocal relationship between the political situation and the fictional subgenre to emerge.

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Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, ed. by Trish Ferguson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series., Jan 2013

In M. P. Shiel’s novel of global catastrophe, The Purple Cloud (1901), a massive volcanic eruptio... more In M. P. Shiel’s novel of global catastrophe, The Purple Cloud (1901), a massive volcanic eruption produces a cloud of lethal gas that wipes out humanity down to a single remaining man. As the lone survivor, Adam Jeffson, wends his erratic way through what has become a planetary necropolis, he notices that not only has the volcanic cloud annihilated all living creatures, it has also stopped all the clocks – symbolically ending time. Thus the ‘thousand weird fore-fingers’ are the clock hands all frozen concurrently with the moment of extinction, ‘keepers of the end of Time’. Nor is this macabre synchronicity coincidental; rather the text exhibits a thematic preoccupation with the nature of time and its putative end that engages with late-nineteenth-century thinking and debate on the subject. As Stephen Kern observes, ‘From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new ways of thinking about and experiencing time’. These ranged from new technologies such as the telephone and phonograph to social developments such as the global standardisation of time, from scientific theories debating the age of the earth to philosophical speculation about the experience of human subjectivity in time. Cumulatively, they accentuated the importance of the temporal aspect of human existence, producing a faster pace of living wherein mere matters of minutes could take on profound significance. The impact of this acceleration was not lost on contemporary writers – as Bryony Randall argues, ‘these writers [were] acutely aware of living in time, of the specific uses of time available or unavailable to them, to their characters, to humanity in general’. One direction that the awareness of the acceleration of ‘modern’ time pointed in was towards humanity’s ultimate future and possible forms of the end of time, a topic of great interest to the popular writers who were beginning to establish the confines of the emerging genre now referred to as science fiction.
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.

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ed. by Mandy Treagus, et al. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014)., 2014

In 1891 the aspiring young Adelaide-born author Guy Boothby set sail from his native city for the... more In 1891 the aspiring young Adelaide-born author Guy Boothby set sail from his native city for the wider opportunities of London. There he made his name with A Bid for Fortune (1895), an international crime thriller featuring his best-known character Dr Nikola, the title of which is most indicative of his attitude toward writing. Inspired by an earlier meeting with Rudyard Kipling in Adelaide, Boothby had come to see fiction-writing as the most promising outlet for his ambition. This paper will argue that just as Kipling’s popularity derived from his ability to mediate the Anglo-Indian experience for domestic British consumption, once in London Boothby similarly tried to construct a distinctive Anglo-Australian identity to differentiate his work in the competitive literary marketplace. His fiction teems with exotic Australasian locales that often function as an end in themselves superfluous to plot requirements. The efficacy of this device is evident in copious reviews lauding his Australian savvy, and spectacular financial success. So meteoric was Boothby’s rise that a spoof article claiming he had recently purchased a solid-gold bath was reiterated as fact across numerous literary magazines. However, as well as a rich vein to be tapped for the metropolitan market, Boothby’s hyphenated identity was a source of conflict for him, producing a sense, expressed by many other contemporary colonial-migrant authors, of belonging fully neither to his home colony nor metropolitan Britain, a kind of ‘doubled hybridity’ as Robert Young puts it. This conflict is apparent in the public authorial persona Boothby adopted which alternatively valorises his outré colonial background and his new status of English country squire. Likewise it pervades his fiction manifesting itself in some idiosyncratic representations that ultimately seem to favour his Australian heritage.

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Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His Worlds, Sally Sugarman (ed.) (Shaftsbury, VT: Mountainside Press, 2013), 2013

It is a commonplace to acknowledge that the world Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring creation, Sherloc... more It is a commonplace to acknowledge that the world Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring creation, Sherlock Holmes, inhabited most comfortably was the seamy underworld of fin-de-siècle London. It is less orthodox, perhaps, to suggest that his role in it was closer to that of the criminal than the agent of the law than is generally thought. That, however, is what this paper will seek to argue in tracing a link between the delineation of the Holmes character and his lesser-known, contemporary, fin-de-siècle criminal alter ego, Dr Nikola.
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.

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Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 5 (Dec 2008). Reprinted in Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors, Artists and Others, ed. by Bernice Murphy and Elizabeth McCarthy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017), 2008

Short biographical article on Guy Boothby; first published with the Irish Journal of Gothic and H... more Short biographical article on Guy Boothby; first published with the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2008); reprinted in Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors, Artists and Others, ed. by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice Murphy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016).

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Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, vol. 7, 2008

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Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, vol. 6 , 2007

By the late nineteenth century the fundamental dependence of society on technology was indisputab... more By the late nineteenth century the fundamental dependence of society on technology was indisputable. Due to a combination of fortunate economic circumstances and the influence of Social Darwinism, the Victorians increasingly believed that social progress was inevitable and were developing a quasi-religious faith in their technology as the means of progress. Fascination with new technology was apparent in the literature of the time, especially in early works of science fiction, or scientific romance as H. G. Wells originally referred to the genre. One of the key reasons for the emergence of this genre was to explore the ever-widening influence of the machine on society. By machine I am referring collectively to scientific research and development, and the technology and machinery that resulted from it, both industrial and military. The widely-held view of the role of the machine in society was optimistic: advances in technology that provided a competitive advantage over rival countries or the ability to expand overseas colonies were to be welcomed. But the
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.

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Conferences and Workshops by Ailise Bulfin

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Paper and panel discussion with authors Deirdre Sullivan and Hazel Larkin, IRC-funded Child Sexual Abuse Seminar Series, hosted by One-in-Four and Trinity College Dublin, June 2017.

Part of a series of 10 public interdisciplinary seminars on child sexual abuse (CSA) being held a... more Part of a series of 10 public interdisciplinary seminars on child sexual abuse (CSA) being held at Trinity College Dublin in 2017, this seminar examines the representation of CSA in culture from author, survivor and scholarly perspectives, followed by open group discussion.
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).

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Gothic Studies, 2021

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021

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‘Associations between forced and “persuaded” first intercourse and later health outcomes in women’, co-authored with McCarthy-Jones, S., Nixon, E., O’Keane, V., Bacik, I., & McElvaney, R

Violence Against Women, 2018

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Global and Planetary Change, Special Humanities issue: The New Human Condition and Climate Change: Humanities and Social Science Perceptions of Threat, 156 (Sept 2017): 140–6., 2017

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Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon, ed. by Daragh Downes and Trish Ferguson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series, 2016

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Literature Compass, 12:9 (Sep 2015): 482-96.

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Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Vol 20, No 1 (2015): Special issue: The Victorians and China

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Critical Survey, Special Edition: Victorian Literature and Science, 27:2 (Summer 2015).

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Jan 1, 2011

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Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, ed. by Trish Ferguson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture series., Jan 2013

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ed. by Mandy Treagus, et al. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2014)., 2014

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Sherlock Holmes: The Man and His Worlds, Sally Sugarman (ed.) (Shaftsbury, VT: Mountainside Press, 2013), 2013

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Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, vol. 7, 2008

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Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, vol. 6 , 2007

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Paper and panel discussion with authors Deirdre Sullivan and Hazel Larkin, IRC-funded Child Sexual Abuse Seminar Series, hosted by One-in-Four and Trinity College Dublin, June 2017.

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).

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Keynote Speaker: Professor David Glover Hosted by the Department of History, Lancaster Universit... more Keynote Speaker: Professor David Glover

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 (harry.1.wood@kcl.ac.uk) and Dr Ailise Bulfin (bulfinam@tcd.ie) by 31 July 2017. Enquiries also to these addresses.

For more information on the Invasion Network: https://invasionnetwork.wordpress.com/

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A one day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub and funded by the Irish ... more A one day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub and funded by the Irish Research Council investigating the life and work of the colourful and controversial popular author, journalist, and amateur spy William Le Queux. The workshop focuses on the phenomenon of British invasion and spy scare fiction and its contribution to the climate of militarism and anxiety that preceded the Great War. Le Queux was instrumental in this genre as the author of some of the most sensational and best-selling invasion scare stories, but he also seems to have had a hand in disseminating worries about an advance guard of German spies in Britain. What is fascinating is how influential this mindset seems to have been and how it was shared by Vernon Kell, the original head of the newly-formed Secret Service Bureau or MI5 as it became known.

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.

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Quartz, 11 Jan 2018

This article examines five key myths purveyed by blockbuster movies about natural and environment... more This article examines five key myths purveyed by blockbuster movies about natural and environmental disaster. Because we use stories to make sense of our world, cultural works like movies provide an interpretative lens through which we can understand various issues. This means that movies like Waterworld (1994), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Interstellar (2014), have helped shape the way we think about disasters, generating pervasive myths about them which can influence the ways we understand them.

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Trinity College Dublin Medical and Health Humanities seminar series, Trinity Long Room Hub & interactive broadcast to clinical sites, March 2018

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Dramatic images of collapse have a long history in our culture, indicative of our understandable ... more Dramatic images of collapse have a long history in our culture, indicative of our understandable curiosity and concern about the fate of human civilisation. This is apparent in an eighteenth-century school of paintings displaying the ‘Romantic’ fascination with ruins and spectacular natural disasters. In the nineteenth century concerns intensified as scientific discovery prompted people to question the long-held, religious conception of humanity’s central position in the cosmos and to fear the unintended consequences of technological advances – evident in the black and white images of collapsed buildings and aerial bombardment from nineteenth-century popular publications. The cataclysmic events of the twentieth century – two world wars and the nuclear threat – coupled with mounting recent concerns about environmental degradation have only intensified this cultural fascination with catastrophe and collapse to the point where our culture seems saturated with them, as is abundantly evident in the images of nuclear disaster, zombies and end times.

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Maynooth Department of English Spring Seminar Series, May 2017.

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Hosted by the M.A. in Culture and Colonialism, National University of Ireland Galway, Nov 2016.

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2nd Executive Forum of the European Observatory of the New Human Condition hosted by the Carlsberg Foundation at the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen, Apr 2015.

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‘I might hide myself in the nethermost parts of the earth, and yet not be beyond the reach of the... more ‘I might hide myself in the nethermost parts of the earth, and yet not be beyond the reach of these yellow fiends and their mysterious power,’ claims the persecuted protagonist of Carlton Dawe’s 1900 thriller The Yellow Man. Despite the gothic overtones, the fiends referred to are not any variety of supernatural creature, but the flesh-and-blood agents of a Chinese secret society who have taken their campaign of terror from China to England. Throughout this purportedly realist narrative, Dawe continues to draw heavily on the conventions of late-nineteenth-century gothic writing, and he was only one of many popular writers to do so in depicting the contemporary imperial fear known as the ‘yellow peril’, notable others including M.P. Shiel and Guy Boothby.
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.

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This paper will examine the curious conjunction between the intensification of a British imperial... more This paper will examine the curious conjunction between the intensification of a British imperial difficulty and the development of a pervasive literary construct in the late-Victorian period. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the canal route had quickly become the lifeline of the British empire and the surrounding territory of Egypt pivotally important to the global balance of power. To ensure access to the canal, Britain unofficially occupied Egypt in 1882 and the unstable status of Egypt following this move became a source of escalating dispute with both emerging Egyptian Islamic-nationalist groups and the other European imperial powers. As fear of losing access to the vital waterway became one of the most pressing imperial concerns of the era, a cycle of Gothic tales positing the irruption of vengeful, supernatural, ancient Egyptian forces within civilised, rational, modern England began to burgeon. The most extreme of these is Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), a Gothic extravaganza of Egyptian retribution on a catastrophic scale, and the theme recurs in texts by other notable fin-de-siècle popular authors including Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’ (1892), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), not to mention in a host of obscure periodical stories, such as Eva M. Henry’s ‘The Curse of Vasartas’ (1889) and K. and H. Prichard’s ‘The Story of Baelbrow’ (1898). Most of these tales, which tend to follow a markedly similar plot structure, include a significant episode set in Egypt in which the country is insistently gothicised and cast as a location of grave danger to the representatives of imperial Britain who traverse it. This paper argues that the complexities of and difficulties posed by the political quandary known as the ‘Egyptian Question’ were refracted through popular fiction to produce the artificial construct of Gothic Egypt, a place which existed solely in the Victorian popular imagination and bore no resemblance to the real country underlying it, but which may have been influential upon the very situation that informed it.

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This paper will explore the conjunction of two types of transport that may be seen as characteris... more This paper will explore the conjunction of two types of transport that may be seen as characteristic of the Victorian period. The first is the dissemination of a racist myth between the peripheries and the centre of the British empire – the myth of the ‘yellow peril’. The second is the mass transportation of Chinese people, often in horrific circumstances, upon which this myth was largely based – the so-called ‘coolie trade’. A visceral doctrine of race hatred, the yellow peril was predicated on the belief that the ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ races could not co-exist and that the West must take heed or be ‘overrun’. It was not coincidental that this imperial myth of Chinese perfidy took shape at the very time that European intrusion into China was entering the accelerated phase which culminated in the Boxer Rebellion and that the labour requirements of Britain’s colonies were driving the mass migration of Chinese indentured labourers across the empire. Chinese people were transported to the settler colonies of South Africa and Australia, where they threatened the lower end of the white labour market, and also to the British West Indies, and were everywhere treated with hostility and suspicion. Though very few Chinese migrants had arrived in Britain in the 1890s, fuelled by strained Sino-British relations and mounting hysteria in the colonies, the fear of the yellow peril had started to take hold in the metropolis by the end of the decade. One major channel for its dissemination was that of popular fiction and this paper will argue that authors of colonial origin who had emigrated to Britain or whose works were published there played a significant role in this process. In examining the works of Australian authors such as Guy Boothby and Kenneth Mackay and the West Indian author M. P. Shiel, the paper will seek to show that the tales of authors with firsthand experience of the immigration of Chinese coolie labourers into Australia and the Caribbean were instrumental in spreading this pernicious myth to the imperial centre before it had yet encountered Chinese immigration for itself.

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"The late-Victorian period saw a revival in the production of gothic fiction that has long attrac... more "The late-Victorian period saw a revival in the production of gothic fiction that has long attracted the critical scrutiny of cultural historians and literary critics. Variously read as reductive, conservative, anxious, unstable and dissident, this multivalent genre gave rise, in a flurry of intense activity between 1886 and 1897, to the texts that launched several of popular culture’s most enduring gothic characters including Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and Dracula. Though it failed to transcend its era, Richard Marsh’s exorbitant 1897 gothic bestseller The Beetle was as potent and influential as any of these on publication, and invites further scholarly attention in order to enhance our understanding of the period. One key aspect of this task is to bring to light the indirect but important contribution it made to the comparable lasting popular gothic trope of the sinister Egyptian mummy that emerged contemporaneously. While treatment of the mummy in current popular culture has devolved to the level of pastiche, in its original deployment it served as the vengeful incarnation of a topical complex of imperial fears concerning Egypt and was a far more menacing prospect. Investigating the operation of this gothic embodiment gives insight into the type of cultural work performed by the gothic mode as a mediator of the imperial experience at the fin de siècle. And this paper endeavours to situate Marsh’s text within an Egyptian-themed offshoot of the gothic in order to elucidate some of the more pragmatic concerns that inform this seemingly unearthly genre.
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."

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In the late 1890s, owing to the same climate of anxiety that produced the numerous novels of Euro... more In the late 1890s, owing to the same climate of anxiety that produced the numerous novels of European war and invasion, a series of conflicts in the Far East helped to engender an Asian version of the invasion threat. Out of fears arising from the tensions caused by European colonial expansion in the region and the perceived threat of global Chinese emigration had developed the myth of the ‘yellow peril’. Superficially it turned upon the imagined dangers of Chinese economic or political resurgence, but at its core it was a visceral doctrine of race hatred, predicated on the belief that the ‘white’ and ‘yellow’ races could not co-exist and that the West must take heed or be ‘overrun’. In 1890s Britain it found political and press expression in Charles H. Pearson’s pessimistic National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893); via reportage of Kaiser Wilhelm’s sensationalisation of the term in response to the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5; and in a provocative 1897 Spectator article, this last written in response to the 1897-8 European scramble for Chinese concessions which strained fraught inter-European relationships and contributed to the retaliatory Boxer Rebellion in 1900. However, another key channel for its dissemination was that of popular fiction and, as this paper will argue, popular authors and periodical editors were also aware of the inflammatory effect of potentially-explosive oriental conflict upon societal invasion fears and equally keen to capitalise upon it.
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).

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By the turn of the nineteenth century British popular periodicals abounded with ‘war-serials’, fi... more By the turn of the nineteenth century British popular periodicals abounded with ‘war-serials’, fictionalisations of ongoing international and colonial disputes that disseminated news of far-flung foreign events to a wide audience. Focusing on the works of the once-popular serial author M. P. Shiel, this paper examines how the periodical trade contributed to the shrinking of the globe in this era of mass communications by bringing accounts of the global into the homes of the fiction-reading public.
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.

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Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, #12, Sep 2013

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2013

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2011

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Broadly speaking my thesis investigates the relationship between imperialism and popular culture ... more Broadly speaking my thesis investigates the relationship between imperialism and popular culture in the fin-de-siècle period. Its specific focus is the intersection between what I term ‘invasion anxiety’ – a paranoid inversion of the optimistic discourse of jingoism – and popular literature by colonial authors. Based on the works of key historians, my thesis characterises fin-de-siècle British society as existing in a state of extreme paranoia concerning the threat of foreign invasion, though ostensibly at its imperial zenith. It ascribes a major reason for this paranoia to a seldom-voiced, but mounting concern that ceaseless imperial expansion was likely to provoke some kind of retributive invasion of Britain, whether by unruly colonial subjects or rival colonial powers. It argues that a key outlet for the expression of this fear was popular culture, and identifies immigrant colonial authors living and writing in the imperial metropolis as a group ideally positioned to articulate it.
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.

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Overview of my current research project in five images.

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Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 18, 2023

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Victorian Popular Fictions Journal

While neo-barbarian dystopian futures are typically associated with contemporary popular culture,... more While neo-barbarian dystopian futures are typically associated with contemporary popular culture, they were not, in fact, uncommon in late-Victorian popular fiction, especially in the politically charged, future-oriented popular fiction subgenres of invasion fiction and catastrophe fiction. Focusing on a representative tale from each subgenre – George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1894) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) – this article shows how they made innovative use of the gothic to show the future following a large-scale war or natural disaster as a decline back into an exaggerated version of the barbaric past. Reworking the familiar gothic trope of doomed inheritance, the tales showed nemesis occurring not on an individual or familial level, but on an extensive societal scale in keeping with their sweeping narratives of mass death and its aftermath. In presenting a post-catastrophe relapse to barbarism, the tales were extrapolating from the social evolution theories of Her...

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Victorian Studies

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Codes for online reader reviews on the Goodreads site of Deirdre Sullivan's young adult novel... more Codes for online reader reviews on the Goodreads site of Deirdre Sullivan's young adult novel Needlework (2016) following inductive thematic analysis. The novel depicts the experiences of its CSA survivor protagonist Ces in the aftermath of intrafamilial CSA.

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Richard Marsh, popular fiction and literary culture, 1890–1915, 2018

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021

In the late-nineteenth century, a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the n... more In the late-nineteenth century, a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children coalesced to produce what would become the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA). Although current understandings of CSA as a public health issue did not crystallise until considerably later, this was the period which witnessed their initial formulation, especially in the new science of sexology. Here theories of pathological sexual attraction to children began to be developed, with an 1894 medico-legal textbook making the shocking claim that the “[r]ape of children is the most frequent form of [all] sexual crime” (Chaddock 1894, 543). The concept of CSA was additionally shaped by two adjacent bodies of work which tended to reach wider audiences: sensational journalism on violent crime, in which W. T. Stead’s infamous 1885 “Maiden Tribute” exposé of child prostitution looms large; and a related strand of popular fiction, which used metaphor to hint a...

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Gothic Studies, 2021

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Critical Survey, 2015

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Changing the Victorian Subject, 2014

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Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 2015

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2011

ONCE WIDELY READ but now largely unknown, MP Shiel was a writer who combined an inflated, idiosyn... more ONCE WIDELY READ but now largely unknown, MP Shiel was a writer who combined an inflated, idiosyncratic style with sweeping philosophical themes to make a minor but distinctive contribution to many of the popular literary genres emerging in the fin de siècle ...

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English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2011

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Critical Survey

The Introduction prefaces a double special issue of Critical Survey examining the work of controv... more The Introduction prefaces a double special issue of Critical Survey examining the work of controversial popular author, journalist and amateur spy William Le Queux from 1880 to 1920. Known as the ‘master of mystery’, Le Queux was prominent in transmitting exaggerated fears about British national security before, during and after the First World War. The Introduction provides a historical and literary framework for the special issue and outlines its central premises: that cultural production in Le Queux’s era was intimately connected with contemporary socio-political forces; that this relationship was well understood by authors such as Le Queux, and often exploited for propagandist purposes; and that the resulting literary efforts were sometimes successful in influencing public opinion. The Introduction also outlines the overall finding that Le Queux’s work tended to distort his subject matter, misinform his readership, and blur the lines between fact and fiction in pursuit of his de...

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Critical Survey

A key text of the pre-First World War invasion fiction genre, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of ... more A key text of the pre-First World War invasion fiction genre, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906) is often assumed to have sold in vast quantities and provoked major controversy. This article investigates the circulation and social impact of this divisive, polemical work before and during the war to provide a more accurate account of its reception. Using Marie Corelli’s proven bestseller The Sorrows of Satan (1895) as a comparator, the article shows sales of The Invasion of 1910 were similar to other bestselling novels, though not comparable to Corelli’s phenomenal sales. Le Queux’s text, however, punched above the weight of the typical bestseller in terms of its social influence, receiving parliamentary censure, extensive newspaper coverage, wide satire and polarised reader responses. Overall, this analysis provides insight into the workings of the popular fiction industry and the nature and extent of invasion fears in the early twentieth century.

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Violence against women, Jan 24, 2018

The effects of nonconsensual first experiences of sexual intercourse in women are understudied. T... more The effects of nonconsensual first experiences of sexual intercourse in women are understudied. This was investigated in 3,875 adult women of whom 6.7% reported "persuaded" first-sex and 0.8% reported forced first-sex. Compared with willing first-sex, both forced and "persuaded" first-sex occurred earlier, involved a greater age difference between partners, and were associated with more lifetime sexual partners and some measures of worse psychological well-being. In addition, "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.

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Global and Planetary Change, 2017

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818116303307 Striking popular culture ... more https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921818116303307 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.

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