Underground literature: Reshaping gender and nation in British and Irish fiction, 1871-1935

This dissertation compiles a varied archive of British and Irish “underground literature”; forgoing an encyclopedic documentation of underground spaces for a series of case studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts, it demonstrates how the unusual and unusually durable topoi of underground space acts as a proving ground for intersections of gender dynamics and national identities that, for a variety of reasons, are less common in non-speculative environments. These texts span an impressive array of genres, including satire, utopia, science fiction, adventure and imperial romance, invasion fiction, and the Hollow Earth tradition. Chapter One identifies four modes working together to form the unique narrative resonances and affordances of fictional underground spaces: the scientific, the science fictional, the Gothic, and the utopian. The following chapter resituates the previously instrumentalized Norah Joyce as the central figure of Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass (1890), bringing new complexity to portrayals and performances of gender in Stoker’s novel. My third chapter pairs H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) with his gaming books, Floor Games (1911) and Little Wars (1913); in it I offer an account of how the miniature and the underground work together to promote a masculinity that preserves itself through pacifist ideology, becoming a breeding ground and repository for not only Wells’s utopian projects and dreams of a global state, but for Britain’s fear of the rise of totalitarian politics. The fourth and final chapter reads Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) alongside Land Under England (1935) by Irish author Joseph O’Neill, ultimately arguing that these works use the totalitarian potential of the underground as a warning against political systems that limit the progress and development of individuals and nations.