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All Outputs (63)

“Waked, and unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land (2023)
Book Chapter
Alder, E. “Waked, and unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land. In C. Sederholm, & K. Woofter (Eds.), The Weird: A Companion. Peter Lang

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1917) is a central but sometimes overlooked figure in the development of weird fiction in the early twentieth century. Hodgson’s work flourished at the intersection of what we now call science fiction, Gothic, fantasy, and... Read More about “Waked, and unquiet”: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land.

Arctic Ghosts: Whale Hunting and Haunting in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Captain of the Pole-Star' (2022)
Journal Article
Alder, E. (2022). Arctic Ghosts: Whale Hunting and Haunting in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Captain of the Pole-Star'. Victorian Studies, 65(1), 43-66

Over-hunting in Arctic seas drove bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus) nearly to extinction by the end of the nineteenth century. Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’” (1883), inspired by his youthful 1880 voyage on the Scottish whalin... Read More about Arctic Ghosts: Whale Hunting and Haunting in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 'The Captain of the Pole-Star'.

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.

Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles (2022)
Book
Alder, E., Packham, J., & Passey, J. (Eds.). (2022). Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles. British Library

From foreboding cliffs and lonely lighthouses to rumbling shingles and silted estuaries, the coasts of the British Isles have stoked the imaginations of storytellers for millennia, lending a rich literary significance to these spaces between land and... Read More about Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles.

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.

“A Thing Of Dreams And Desires, A Siren, A Whisper, And A Seduction”: Mermaids and the seashore in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine (2021)
Journal Article
Alder, E. (2021). “A Thing Of Dreams And Desires, A Siren, A Whisper, And A Seduction”: Mermaids and the seashore in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine. Shima, 15(2), 85-100. https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.142

The Sea Lady (1901) is one of the more neglected early novels of H. G. Wells, particularly compared to his more famous scientific romances. Both a social satire and a mediation on the limits of human imagination, Wells’s only mermaid story has drawn... Read More about “A Thing Of Dreams And Desires, A Siren, A Whisper, And A Seduction”: Mermaids and the seashore in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady: A Tissue of Moonshine.

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.

Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings (2021)
Book Chapter
Alder, E. (2021). Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings. In C. Bloom (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic (839-856). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_45

Ghost ships are an enduring trope in history, literature, and folklore of the sea, and continually change in meaning according to their cultural contexts. The early twentieth century produced British nautical gothic fiction that grapples with the imp... Read More about Shades of Sail: Edwardian Nautical Hauntings.

Foreword by Dr. Emily Adler (2020)
Book Chapter
Alder, E. (2020). Foreword by Dr. Emily Adler. In Footsteps in the Dark: Short Stories, Anthology of New & Classic Tales (8-9). Flame Tree Publishing

Ecocriticism and the Genre (2020)
Book Chapter
Alder, E., & Bavidge, J. (2020). Ecocriticism and the Genre. In C. Bloom (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (225-242). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_14

‘Ecocriticism and the Genre’ explores a recent and topical development in Gothic scholarship, the ecogothic. Gothic literature often exhibits a fascination with sublime, terrifying, and horrifying aspects of the natural world, its creatures, plants,... Read More about Ecocriticism and the Genre.

Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle (2020)
Book
Alder, E. (2020). Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32652-4

This book explores how nineteenth-century science stimulated the emergence of weird tales at the fin de siècle, and examines weird fiction by British writers who preceded and influenced H. P. Lovecraft, the most famous author of weird fiction. From l... Read More about Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle.

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.