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This thesis is about the complex network of metaphors that emerged around late nineteenth-century conceptions of economic self-interest — metaphors that dramatised the predatory, conflictual and exploitative basis of relations between nations, institutions, sexes and people in an outwardly belligerent fin-de-siècle economy. More specifically, this thesis is about the vampire, cannibal and related genera of economic metaphor which I argue penetrate many of the major discourses of the period in ways that have yet to be understood. In chapters that examine socialist fiction and newspapers; the imperial quest romance; inter-personal intimacies in the writing of Henry James and Vernon Lee; and the Catholic novels of Lucas Malet, I assess the breadth and variety of these metaphors, and consider how they filter the concept of the conflictual ‘economic man’ inspired by Hobbes and formalised in nineteenth-century economic discourses. The thesis builds on Maggie Kilgour’s From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation (1990), which traces the genealogy – in literature from Homer to Melville – of what she terms ‘metaphors of incorporation’. In basic terms, these are metaphors that originate from a foundational inside-outside binary and involve the assimilation or incorporation of an external reality. Kilgour attempts to demonstrate that with the increasing isolation of the modern individual (signalled by the acts of enclosure and the formalisation of property rights, for instance) acts of ‘incorporation’ previously imagined as symbiotic (early communion), were later conceived as cannibalistic (oedipal rivalry). Representing an appetitive antagonism between aggressor and victim, the figures at the centre of this study – the economic vampire and its cognates – have integrity as metaphors of incorporation. However, deploying a combination of historicist and, at times, Post-Structuralist approaches, this thesis demonstrates that these metaphors refuse to accommodate themselves to a simple unified vision of the kind advanced by Kilgour. Therefore, in this thesis, I map the complexities of these metaphors, explaining how they originate from divergent teleological impulses and how they articulate both simple ideological operations, and more complex feelings of ambivalence about economic realities in the cultural moment of the Victorian fin-de-siècle.

The Victorian need to compartmentalise and define women’s sexuality in terms of opposing binaries was paralleled by the vague idea that the period’s French and British literatures were at odds with one another. Elucidating the deep connections between, and common concerns shared by, French Naturalist and Realist and British New Woman authors, this thesis shatters the dichotomies that attempted to structure and define women’s sexuality in the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The thesis focusses on novels and short stories by French authors Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, and New Woman authors Sarah Grand, Ménie Muriel Dowie and Vernon Lee. In a time during which the feminist movement was gaining momentum, and female sexuality was placed at the heart of a range of discourses, and scrutinised from a number of different angles – not only in literature, but in medicine, psychology, sexology, criminology – the consideration of the female sexual self and her subjectivity brings together the work of authors whose oeuvres have been largely considered as antithetical. Previous work has indeed shown the centrality of female sexuality to both literatures, yet never compared them. This thesis rediscovers the significance of both literatures’ investment in a discourse revolving around female sexuality by contrasting the French male authors with the British female writers, and uncovering unexpected parallels in their claims about the contemporary situation of women. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe’s feminist philosophy frames the thesis’s comparative analysis, questioning and re-examining these authors’ representations of female sexuality. The ideas of sensuality and rationality, motherhood, reproduction, marriage, and prostitution thus become recurring concerns throughout it. The thesis’s first chapter considers the female as sexual subject and/or object of the male gaze, in a range of New Woman and French literature. The second and third chapters are organised around the themes of marriage and prostitution, and the final chapter considers issues of female sexuality within the fantastic short story.