Time and Space, Truth and Fiction in the Works of H. G. Wells and Henry James Pubblico
Agnew, Kelsey Rae (2010)
Abstract
A number of scientific and technological innovations that came
about during the nineteenth century had a resounding effect on
Victorian culture. The advent of the railway along with the
introduction of new communications media and radical biological and
geological discoveries had major implications for western society's
understanding of the relationship between space and time and of
humanity's role within that relationship. As time and space were
expanded, the speed at which they could be experienced caused
them to be simultaneously annihilated, greatly increasing the
number of impressions - and the amount of experience - an
individual could acquire. By the 1890s, the effects of this
phenomenon had become some of the most widely discussed topics in a
multitude of cultural discourses, and since, as H. Porter Abbott
writes in the Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, "the
representation of conflict in narrative provides a way for a
culture to talk to itself about, and possibly resolve, conflicts
that threaten to fracture it (or at least making living
difficult)," the literature produced during the last decade of the
century exemplifies the extent to which these changes influenced
society on both individual and collective levels. This thesis
focuses on two works by Henry James - The Turn of the Screw
and In the Cage, both published in 1898 - as well as H. G.
Wells's The Time Machine, published in 1895. Shortly after
these works were introduced into Victorian culture, James and Wells
became involved in a lifelong quarrel regarding the purpose of the
novel: Wells adeptly explained it in a 1915 letter to James when he
stated, "to you literature like painting is an end, to me
literature like architecture is a means, it has a use." Despite
their differences - as Wells confessed, "I had a queer feeling that
we were both incompatibly right" - both authors address the
newly-realized ambiguity of the relationships between time and
space, truth and fiction, man and machine.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction - 1
1. The Art(s) of Fiction - 11
2. The Time Machine: An Experiment in Fiction - 16
3. The Ambiguity of Truth in The Turn of the Screw -
34
4. The Telegraphist and the Novelist: Making Knowledge of
Impressions - 47
Conclusion - 61
Bibliography - 65
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