Shifting Geological and Literary Lines in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Geoliterary Approach
This article adopts a geoliterary approach to explore the way some travel and adventure writers were shifting literary lines at the turn of the 19th century, especially through their use of vertical fault lines. In H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau or Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, as the charact...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2024-12-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/18339 |
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| Summary: | This article adopts a geoliterary approach to explore the way some travel and adventure writers were shifting literary lines at the turn of the 19th century, especially through their use of vertical fault lines. In H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau or Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, as the characters explore unknown islands or enclaved spaces, they are confronted with literal “chasms” which they have to cross or explore in order to progress in their journeys. Such geological interruptions often represent hurdles in the travellers’ trajectories, and subsequently give them access to a new, previously unknown world or reality. Crossing these rifts may then result in a shift in genre, or at least in narrative rhythm and style. As the hero is put to the test, these spatial chasms sometimes reveal and even mirror the fault lines in his very identity, but also in the homogeneity and consistency of the narratives. The faulty travellers’ narratives are indeed often fraught with gaps and contradictions, which some critics have interpreted as symptomatic of the work’s flawed nature. However, this paper argues that such hiatuses in fact evince these works’ disruptive hybridity, and their utter modernity. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |