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William Hope Hodgson's Borderlands

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William Hope Hodgson's Borderlands William Hope Hodgson’s borderlands: monstrosity, other worlds, and the future at the fin de siècle Emily Ruth Alder A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Edinburgh Napier University, for the award of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 © Emily Alder 2009 Contents Acknowledgements 3 Abstract 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One. Hodgson’s life and career 13 Chapter Two. Hodgson, the Gothic, and the Victorian fin de siècle: literary 43 and cultural contexts Chapter Three. ‘The borderland of some unthought of region’: The House 78 on the Borderland, The Night Land, spiritualism, the occult, and other worlds Chapter Four. Spectre shallops and living shadows: The Ghost Pirates, 113 other states of existence, and legends of the phantom ship Chapter Five. Evolving monsters: conditions of monstrosity in The Night 146 Land and The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ Chapter Six. Living beyond the end: entropy, evolution, and the death of 191 the sun in The House on the Borderland and The Night Land Chapter Seven. Borderlands of the future: physical and spiritual menace and 224 promise in The Night Land Conclusion 267 Appendices Appendix 1: Hodgson’s early short story publications in the popular press 273 Appendix 2: Selected list of major book editions 279 Appendix 3: Chronology of Hodgson’s life 280 Appendix 4: Suggested map of the Night Land 281 List of works cited 282 © Emily Alder 2009 2 Acknowledgements I sincerely wish to thank Dr Linda Dryden, a constant source of encouragement, knowledge and expertise, for her belief and guidance and for luring me into postgraduate research in the first place. I am, likewise, deeply grateful to Dr Sara- Patricia Wasson for her invaluable knowledge, advice, insights, enthusiasm, and appreciation. Completion of my PhD was made possible by a studentship from the Faculty of Engineering, Computing, and Creative Industries for 2008. Anne Sibbald has been unremittingly supportive of my personal and professional development over the past few years, of which I am greatly appreciative. It has been a pleasure sharing an office with Gracia, Kate, Melanie, Rona, Stephanie, Rennie, and Julia of ‘Room 204’; thank you for calming and encouraging me with good company, shared experiences, and coffee. I also thank Professors Alistair McCleery, Laurence Davies, and Ian Campbell for the benefit of their advice and experience. My thanks to the Graduate School, and to Dr Alison Crerar, Professors Jessie Kennedy and Chris Atton, and the others of the FECCI postgraduate support team for providing invaluable learning opportunities, and promoting community among the Faculty research students. Grants from the School of Creative Industries have enabled me to attend conferences in France, Stirling, and Leicester. My thanks to NULIS, especially Marian Kirton and Robin Thomson for advice and for locating obscure Hodgson materials on inter-library loan. I am also appreciative of the resources provided by the scholarly community of VICTORIA, the National Library of Scotland, and the library of the University of Edinburgh. Finally, I am very grateful to my family, George, Beth, Katy, Lucy, and Rod, for their continual faith, love, care, and encouragement. © Emily Alder 2009 3 Abstract William Hope Hodgson has generally been understood as the author of several atmospheric sea-horror stories and two powerful but flawed horror science fiction novels. There has been no substantial study analysing the historical and cultural context of his fiction or its place in the Gothic, horror, and science fiction literary traditions. Through analysing the theme of borderlands, this thesis contextualises Hodgson’s novels and short stories within these traditions and within late Victorian cultural discourse. Liminal other world realms, boundaries of corporeal monstrosity, and the imagined future of the world form key elements of Hodgson’s fiction, reflecting the currents of anxiety and optimism characterising fin-de-siècle British society. Hodgson’s early career as a sailor and his interest in body-building and physical culture colour his fiction. Fin-de-siècle discourses of evolution, entropy, spiritualism, psychical research, and the occult also influence his ideas. In The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), the known world brushes against other forms of reality, exposing humanity to incomprehensible horrors. In The Ghost Pirates (1909), the sea forms a liminal region on the borderland of materiality and immateriality in which other world encounters can take place. In The Night Land and The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), evolution gives rise to strange monstrous forms existing on the borderlines of species and identity. In Hodgson’s science fiction—The House on the Borderland and The Night Land—the future of the earth forms a temporal borderland of human existence shaped by fin-de-siècle fears of entropy and the heat-death of the sun. Alongside the work of other writers such as H. G. Wells and Arthur Machen, Hodgson’s four novels respond to the borderland discourses of the fin de siècle, better enabling us to understand the Gothic literature of the period as well as Hodgson’s position as a writer who offers a unique imaginative perspective on his contemporary culture. © Emily Alder 2009 4 Introduction In almost every sense of the phrase, William Hope Hodgson is a writer of borderlands. His life straddled the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. His fiction crosses boundaries of genre and convention, and its subject matter returns compulsively to the Gothic borderlands of realities, bodies, and imagination; it is with these borderlands that this thesis is primarily concerned. Hodgson’s novels and his best known short stories are written in fantastic modes: the Gothic tradition, the characteristic supernatural and horror of the fin de siècle, and the emerging genre of science fiction. As a young man Hodgson was a sailor and much of his fiction is characterised by a marine setting combined with monstrous horrors produced by unknown reaches of the oceans. His novels and stories are further shaped, like other contemporaneous texts, by the cultural conditions of the fin de siècle: its science, sociology, and politics. Hodgson’s four novels—The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), and The Night Land (1912)—are acknowledged for their imaginative power and have earned him a place as the ‘first great exponent of cosmic horror’ and ‘one of the masters of the modern horror story’ (Stableford ‘Early Modern Horror Fiction 100; Neilson ‘The Night Land’ 1105). Due to his compelling visions of horror and his emergence in the early years of the twentieth century, Hodgson occupies an important position in the development of the literary traditions of horror and science fiction as these diversified from the modern Gothic of the fin de siècle. Hodgson’s visions of universal end, the terrors of the sea, and the degeneration of the human body have resonated through modern culture and influenced numerous subsequent texts. The astral journeys of The House on the Borderland, for example, foreshadow those of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) (see © Emily Alder 2009 5 also note 82). Hodgson’s monstrous cosmic horror echoes through H. P. Lovecraft’s stories, such as ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ (1928); the skeletal pirates of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) draw on The Ghost Pirates; and the ‘abhumans’ of the Games Workshop wargame Warhammer 40000 derive from The Night Land. Despite this, Hodgson has never been the subject of a dedicated critical study, and this thesis will focus on analysis of his fiction. It does not trace Hodgson’s impact on twentieth-century horror, which is beyond the scope of what is attempted here and constitutes further work. Before that can be done, however, the work of this thesis provides an important basis for understanding and analysing Hodgson’s fiction, contextualising him within the fin de siècle and engaging with the traditions out of which his fictions arise. Reasons for the neglect of Hodgson’s work include his early death in the First World War, the failure of his novels to reach a wide readership (partly because he chose not to serialise them before book publication), and problems encountered by readers and commentators over Hodgson’s stylistic decisions, usually characterised as ‘archaic’ and ‘sentimental’, for example by H. P. Lovecraft. The Night Land in particular attracts these latter accusations; this problematic and extraordinary book has coloured critical generalisations about the rest of Hodgson’s work, as well as about his talents, capabilities, and personal values. It is in part the work of this thesis to suggest a re- evaluation of Hodgson as a writer and to examine his four novels as forming a consistent attempt to explore the borderlands of human experience. In recent decades the value of Hodgson’s work has been more widely recognised, helped perhaps by a modern willingness to overlook his stylistic ‘flaws’ and a recognition that the power of his visions of horror has endured over the past hundred years and continues to seize the imagination of modern readers. Since the 1970s an increasing interest in early Gothic horror and supernatural fiction has led to regular © Emily Alder 2009 6 reprints of Hodgson’s work; 2003-6, for example, saw the first complete Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson, published in five volumes.1 The last ten or twenty years have also seen a small amount of critical analysis in publication—by Kelly Hurley, for example—of varying length and detail. There remains considerable work to be done to furnish Hodgson’s fiction with the attention it deserves, however, especially with regard to the recurrent ideas Hodgson attempts to work out across the course of his novels.
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