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Issues which faced Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries include the effects of new scientific theories on traditional religious belief, the impact of technological innovation, the implications of mass literacy and the changing role of women. This thesis records how such issues are reflected in contemporary literature, focusing on the emergence of popular culture and the best seller, a term which conflates author and novel. The first English best seller was Marie Corelli and, by way of introduction, Part I offers a summary of her life and her novels and a critical overview of her work. Part II of the thesis examines how the theory of evolution undermined traditional religious belief and prompted the search for a new creed able to defy materialism and reconcile science and religion. Contemporary literature mirrors the consequent interest in spiritualism during the 1890s and the period immediately following the Great War, and critical readings of Corelli�s A Romance of Two Worlds and The Life Everlasting demonstrate that these novels - which form the nucleus of her personal theology, the Electric Creed - are based on selections from the New Testament, occultism and, in particular, science and spiritualism. Part III of the thesis looks at the emergence of �the woman question�, the corresponding backlash by conservatives and the ways in which these conflicting views are explored in the popular literature of the time. A critical examination of the novella, My Wonderful Wife, reveals how Corelli uses social Darwinism in an ambivalent critique of the New Woman. Several of Corelli�s essays are discussed, showing that her views about the role of women were complex. A critical analysis of The Secret Power engages with Corelli�s peculiar kind of feminism, which would deny women the vote but envisages female scientists inventing and operating airships in order to secure the future of the human race. Interest in Marie Corelli has re-emerged recently, particularly in occult and feminist circles. Corelli�s immense popularity also makes her an important figure in cultural studies. This thesis adds to the body of knowledge about Corelli in that it consciously endeavours to avoid spiritualist or feminist ideological frameworks, instead using contemporary science as a context for examining her work.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Adviser: Elizabeth Hearne. UMI Cat. no.: 3269982. Includes bibliographical references (p. 411-442)

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-117)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in English. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 433-469). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ99228

Please read the abstract in the section 05back of this document / Thesis (DLitt (Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Afrikaans / unrestricted

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This dissertation is an intransigent probing into the Enlightenment scientific conjectures and theories of the eighteenth century that fantasized into existence a character called ‘Man.’ It explores how the category of the human, particularly at the intersection of certain genres like ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ was elaborated in the scientific thought of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and later re-scripted in contemporary art, literature, and film, both from the Afro-diaspora and otherwise. Working at the nexus of several intersecting threads of scholarship, including comparative literature, black feminist theory, performance studies, slavery studies, memory studies, and the history of science, this dissertation examines how this Enlightenment scientific writing and experimentation on the human turned to people racialized black, specifically young women—their bodies, their children—to construct speculative (and to a large degree, enduring) conceptions of a Western ‘Man’ universalized as the only iteration of the human. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the notion of the human was not a given but a problem, an unfixed nexus of ideas, contested beliefs, and scientific experiment central to the shifting conception of Western ‘Man.’ This dissertation sets out to emphasize both the “performative” and the “speculative” nature of these shifting perceptions as they were played out through the literal commodification of people racialized black and non-white. This commodification within scientific practice of the period not only perpetuated the ideologies of the system of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade, but also directly informed the evolution of these competing, scientific theories of the human. The labor these individuals racialized non-white were asked to contribute in the name of eighteenth-century science (via, for instance, their circulation and participation as subjects in experiments) would support the continuation of a scientific empire unapologetically structured around an anthropocentric project of whiteness. This dissertation is structured around three core “Acts,” organized respectively around Denise Ferreira da Silva’s three onto-epistemological pillars of Western ‘Man’—separability, determinacy, and sequentiality. Each Act engages in reading practices in which the eighteenth-century archive is analyzed both through fiction and as a type of fiction. This type of reading helps denaturalize this Enlightenment archive’s performative fictions, pulling to the surface the speculative maneuvers at play in the formation of the category of ‘Man’ that continue, to this day, to present themselves as objective, axiomatic, factual, and universal. Through these cross-temporal analyses, this dissertation seeks to remain attentive to the ways in which the memories, postmemories, afterlives, and current-day lived legacies of this history all speak to a scholarly and artistic need to continue wrestling with the conundrums that this historical and intellectual construction of the human has left in its wake.

This project explores the intersection of literature and science from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century in the context of this shift in conceptions of space and time. Confronted with the rapid and immense expansion of space and time, eighteenth and nineteenth-century philosophers and authors sought to locate humans' relative position in the vast void. Furthermore, their attempts to spatially and temporally map the universe led to changes in perceptions of the relationship between the exterior world and the interior self. In this dissertation I focus on a few important textual monuments that serve as landmarks on this journey. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the intersection of literary and scientific texts transformed perceptions of space and time. These transformations then led to further advancements in the way scientific knowledge was articulated. Imagination became central to scientific writing at the same time it came to dominate literary writing. My project explores these intersecting influences among literature, astronomy, cosmology, and geology, on the perceptions of expanding space and time.