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All Outputs (27)

Time and the Terrors of the Shoreline in Dunsany and Wells (2022)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2022, July). Time and the Terrors of the Shoreline in Dunsany and Wells. Paper presented at Gothic Interruptions: 16th Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

The shoreline is a popular stage for the end of the world in fin-de-siècle fiction – it is upon a shore that H. G. Wells’s Time Traveller witnesses the final remnant of animal life, William Hope Hodgson’s Recluse discovers the meaning of eternity, an... Read More about Time and the Terrors of the Shoreline in Dunsany and Wells.

Creatures of Moonshine: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’ and the Oceanic Romance (2022)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2022, April). Creatures of Moonshine: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’ and the Oceanic Romance. Paper presented at BSLS 2022 Annual Conference, Manchester

There is a strand of nineteenth-century fiction interested in tentacled monsters based to a greater or lesser extent on cephalopods. Although the legendary kraken remained a legend, biology had learned a little about the real existence of giant squid... Read More about Creatures of Moonshine: H. G. Wells’s ‘The Sea Raiders’ and the Oceanic Romance.

Spectres in the Arctic: Whales and Arthur Conan Doyle (2021)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2021, July). Spectres in the Arctic: Whales and Arthur Conan Doyle. Paper presented at Dark Economies, University of Falmouth

Whales have long held powerful symbolic places in the art, writing, and folklore of coastal and sea-going cultures globally. Under the expansion of industrialised whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, however, both the whales and their me... Read More about Spectres in the Arctic: Whales and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Entangled Terrestrials: Mapping E.T.’s Ecological Web (2021)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2021, April). The Entangled Terrestrials: Mapping E.T.’s Ecological Web. Paper presented at British Society for Literature and Science Annual Conference, Online

Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) has accrued an eclectic but small body of scholarly criticism. With this paper I contribute an ecocritical analysis of the film, suggesting that the disruption to Elliott’s schoolboy life caused by... Read More about The Entangled Terrestrials: Mapping E.T.’s Ecological Web.

Weird Sisters: Victorian women’s ghost stories and a new look at the weird tale (2019)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2019, August). Weird Sisters: Victorian women’s ghost stories and a new look at the weird tale. Paper presented at Victorian Renewals: British Association of Victorian Studies Conference 2019, University of Dundee

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, weird fiction looks like a masculine tradition. While there are numerous women among recent ‘New Weird’ writers, female authorship of early weird tales barely shows up next to the success of H. P.... Read More about Weird Sisters: Victorian women’s ghost stories and a new look at the weird tale.

Mould ships and fungal islands: mycology, ecoGothic and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘doubtful beings’ (2018)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2018, July). Mould ships and fungal islands: mycology, ecoGothic and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘doubtful beings’. Paper presented at 14th Conference of the IGA 'Gothic Hybridities', Manchester Metropolitan University

For most of the long nineteenth century, the apparently hybrid biological workings and the unstable taxonomical status of moulds and fungi puzzled and fascinated scientists. Their ubiquity, plasticity, and position in what Ernst Haeckel termed a ‘bou... Read More about Mould ships and fungal islands: mycology, ecoGothic and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘doubtful beings’.

Underwater Plastic Frankenstein (2017)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2017, November). Underwater Plastic Frankenstein. Paper presented at Gothic Nature, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Doctor Moreau’s Pink Rabbits (2015)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2015, April). Doctor Moreau’s Pink Rabbits. Paper presented at British Society for Literature and Science annual conference, Liverpool University

The first law of time travel: The Time Machine and thermodynamics. (2013)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Alder, E. (2013, April). The first law of time travel: The Time Machine and thermodynamics. Paper presented at British Society for Literature and Science Annual Conference

Critical analyses of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) have attended closely to themes of biology, such as evolutionary degeneration, but those of physics have not been treated with comparable depth. While many accounts of The Time Machine do con... Read More about The first law of time travel: The Time Machine and thermodynamics..