Richard Marsh

Minna Vuohelainen

Description

‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘Exactly where I was I could not tell’: panopticism, imageability and the Gothic city
Chapter 2: ‘The key of the street’: displacement, transit and Gothic flux
Chapter 3: Houses of mystery: liminal thresholds and Gothic interiors
Chapter 4: Laughing in the face of the authorities: haunting and heterotopia in Richard Marsh’s short supernatural fiction
Conclusion
Bibliography
Primary: volumes
Primary: periodical publication
Primary: archival sources
Secondary

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Romance
• Gothic

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 26 août 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783163403
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

RICHARD MARSH

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions is dedicated to publishing in- novative introductory guides to writers of the Gothic. The series explores how new critical approaches and perspectives can help us to recontextualize an author’s work in a way that is both accessible and informative. The series publishes work that is of interest to students of all levels and teachers of the literary Gothic and cultural history.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Sheffield Benjamin Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist,Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia David Punter, University of Bristol Angela Wright, University of Sheffield Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

GOTHIC AUTHORS: CRITICAL REVISIONS

Richard Marsh

Minna Vuohelainen

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2015

© Minna Vuohelainen, 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78316-339- e-ISBN 978-1-78316-340-3

The right of Minna Vuohelainen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham,Wiltshire

In memory of Pirkko Vuohelainen (1949–2014)

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Introduction

C ONTENTS

1 ‘Exactly Where I Was I Could not Tell’: Panopticism,  Imageability and the Gothic City

2 ‘The Key of the Street’: Displacement,Transit and  Gothic Flux

3 Houses of Mystery: Liminal Thresholds and  Gothic Interiors

4 Laughing in the Face of the Authorities: Haunting  and Heterotopia in Richard Marsh’s Short Supernatural  Fiction

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography  Primary: volumes  Primary: periodical publication  Primary: archival sources  Secondary

Index

1

20

41

64

86

119

125

151 151 154 163 163

175

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Introduction

E

D

Why Richard Marsh?

‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was one of the bestselling popular authors of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Commended during his life as ‘a master of his craft’, in command of considerable ‘con- structive skill’ and an ‘unusually pleasant and lucid’ writing style, he marshalled ‘an ingenious series of plots and counterplots, devices, 1 and mysterious inter-relations’ in his fiction. Marsh, now increasingly recognised as a seminal popular writer of the fin-de-siècle, belonged to a generation of professional authors who produced genre fiction for a growing audience of lower-middle-class consumers of print who, in the aftermath of the 1870 Education Act, were increasingly demanding affordable and entertaining fiction, either in book or magazine form. In the course of his career, Marsh catered for a number of such audiences: in the early 1880s, he wrote boys’ adventure and school fiction under his real name, Bernard Heldmann; in the 1890s, his fiction largely fell into the topical genres of Gothic, occult and crime fiction; in the Edwardian period, the bulk of his writing exploited the vogue for thrillers and popular romances; during the first year of the First World War, at the very end of his life, he began to move towards spy and war fiction; and much of his work includes elements of the New Humour. Marsh was as prolific