H. G. Wells's Fin-de-Siècle: Twenty-first Century Reflections on the Early H. G. Wells (review)

Apropos of the recent turn of the twenty-first century, John S. Partington has brought together a collection of essays that deal with H. G. Wells's writings at the turn of the previous century. Intended as a critical reassessment of Wells, the essays provide a thoughtful and wide-ranging consideration of his major literary output and associations during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. All of the essays were originally published in The Wellsian, and all but one of them during Partington's 1999-2009 tenure as editor. (The exception, Sylvia Hardy's "H. G. Wells the Poststructuralist" was first published in 1994.) In his introduction, Partington characterizes the collection as the "cream" of recent Wells scholarship, and he expresses the additional hope that the "interpretations of the anxieties represented in the early-twentieth century literature and literary friendships of H. G. Wells" will provide food for thought as we consider "our own new century" (3). Partington's introduction gives a succinct overview of Wells's entire literary career, lamenting the neglect of the vast majority of Wells's imaginative works, particularly those published after the early 1900s. However, this particular volume is not intended to redress that neglect.

The book is divided into four sections. The first section, "The Scientific Romancer Emergeth," deals with Wells's early scientific romances. Katrina Harack's essay "Limning the Impossible: Time Travel, the Uncanny, and Destructive Futurity in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine" situates the eponymous novel within a discussion of Freud's notion of the uncanny, proposing that the Traveller encounters the future as uncanny, both unfamiliar and familiar. "Having confronted the simultaneous alterity and recognisability of this other time," Harack writes, "the Time Traveller has experienced such a psychological disruption that he cannot expect to be believed" (15). This psychological trauma unfits him for a seamless transition back to his own age, and he once again escapes through his time machine. Nick Redfern continues the psychoanalytic approach in "Abjection and Evolution in The Island of Doctor Moreau," in which he argues that Moreau personifies the perversity of the abject as defined by Julia Kristeva. Prendick's time on Moreau's island compels him to face the implications of evolution, "[forcing him] time and again to return to a place prior to signification"—not "prior to the mirror stage" but "prior to Homo Sapiens Sapiens" (24). Prendick is traumatized by his realization of the fine line separating human from nonhuman, and like the Time Traveller, he returns to Victorian England a traumatized man; unlike the Traveller, however, he has no means of escape. Kimberly Jackson also focuses on The Island of Doctor Moreau. In her essay "Vivisected Language in H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau," Jackson proposes that the novel is "a story of the interrelation of literary and scientific vivisection, the two 'operations' violently intertwined" (28). For Jackson, the novel's patchwork of genres and literary tropes (many of which have to do with body parts) mirrors Moreau's experimental hack jobs and reveals the extent to which the category of the human is itself a hack job, a fiction rough-hewn through language. In the final article in this section, "The War of the Worlds Considered as a Modern Myth," Brett Davidson analyzes the mythic elements in The War of the Worlds (1898). While he acknowledges that in some ways myth and science fiction are diametrically opposed, he argues that there are "vital intersections of the two, particularly in the work of H. G. Wells" (41). Davidson demonstrates the ways in which Wells remakes myth and in so doing "preserves" its "essence."

The second section, "Portraying the Petit-Bourgeoisie," focuses on Wells's explorations of class and other social problems. Hiroshi So situates Wells...