| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines depictions of extraterrestrial worlds in the popular literature and culture of the late Victorian and Edwardian period, focusing particularly on the interplanetary romance. By carefully situating these representations in relation to contemporary processes and understandings of global Anglophone expansion, it demonstrates how interplanetary romances played an important albeit variously accented role in energising, complicating and challenging expansionism at a time when the ongoing viability of a modern imperial capitalist world-system was increasingly subject to debate.
In the late nineteenth century the developments of the modern world-system were a source of excitement but also concern. Many such concerns centred upon the geographical limitations of the world itself. The imminent closure of the global frontier, alongside increasingly rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, generated anxieties over the approach of a “closed and full” world (Williams 2013), in which resources would be exhausted, biodiversity depleted and progress halted. As global geography became a source of anxiety, late nineteenth-century culture witnessed an explosion of interest in extraterrestrial spaces.
This thesis consists of four chapters. The first outlines the proliferation of Anglophone space exploration narratives following the publication of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and the emergence of the interplanetary romance genre. Focusing on the fantasy of an extraterrestrial New World, it considers the ways in which popular literature helped to perpetuate imperial capitalist ideologies of expansion, while also mitigating spatial anxieties arising from the closure of the global frontier. The second chapter considers the extraterrestrial New World as a realm of infinite economic possibility. As a growing awareness of the biophysical limits to human expansion on Earth seemed to signal the exhaustion of Western imperial capitalism’s “Cheap Nature strategy” (Moore 2015), interplanetary authors crafted fantasies of an inexhaustible alien Nature, while also using off-world settings to explore more sustainable economic models. The third chapter expands upon questions of growth and sustainability in relation to contemporary anxieties regarding food security. Fantasies of consuming alien meat seem to posit the extension of contemporary globalised food networks, in which Anglophone newlands supplied staples – and particularly meat – to oldland cities (Belich 2009), into outer space. At the same time, the recurring figure of the vegetarian alien challenges the carnivorous status quo, and chemical food technologies suggest the possibility of sustainable subsistence within a closed planetary system. The fourth chapter returns to the question of space, reading depictions of the alien city against the anxieties accumulating around the nineteenth-century metropolis. Incorporating ideas and discourses from contemporary reform movements, architecture, and urban design, the imagined extraterrestrial city presents a Utopian environment in which crises of overcrowding, pollution and disease are overcome, and alternative economic and social systems become viable.
Drawing on postcolonial and Marxist theories, as well as ecocriticism, cultural geography, and world-systems analysis, this thesis explores the ways in which representations of extraterrestrial spaces worked explicitly as well as implicitly to energise expansionist and imperialist ideologies; to respond to fears of overcrowding and degeneration; to question the sustainability of a globalised capitalist economy; and to explore alternative social, political, and economic models to an increasingly hegemonic earth-bound industrial capitalist world system. | en_GB |
