A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937

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Jonathan Newell. A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937

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A CENTURY OF

Weird Fiction

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Hurley’s approach to horror and disgust has been influential, leading to such works as Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Body Gothic (2014), which shares with this work an interest in the disintegration of bodies and affects such as fear and disgust. For Aldana Reyes, horror fiction is rooted in anxieties around ‘interstitiality’ and the refusal of ‘absolute human taxonomies’, and he notes that what he calls body gothic ‘prods the limits of taste and decorum’. I have, like Aldana Reyes, an appreciation for the way that weird texts elicit ‘horror, shock or disgust in those who stand for a normative version of humanity’. Like both Joshi and Hurley, however, Aldana Reyes is interested in the ways that the revolting transgressions of horror confront us with a sense of ‘unspeakable corporeality’ and a kind of base materialism, one reducing not just human beings but reality as a whole to purely physicalist terms.29

I am certainly not entirely denying the viability of the approach broadly shared by scholars like Joshi, Hurley and Aldana Reyes, or the merit of thinking about late Victorian gothic and weird fiction in relation to scientific discourses, but at the same time I think that weird fiction is not merely a reflection of the brute thingness of matter. I suggest that weird monstrosity and revolting subjects of the sort Hurley terms abhuman and Aldana Reyes identifies as corporeally transgressive can be read not only in relation to scientific discourse but also to metaphysical speculation that explicitly moves beyond a mechanistically materialist or wholly scientific understanding of the world.

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