Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

by Nicholas Daly

Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the "romance revival" of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on authors such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, Daly argues that these adventure narratives provided a narrative of cultural change at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the "new imperialism." The presence of a genre such as romance within modernism, he claims, should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 1996

About the author

Nicholas Daly, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, University College Dublin. Educated at University College Cork and Brown University, Nicholas Daly is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin, and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has also taught at Wesleyan University, Dartmouth College, and Trinity College Dublin. His publications include Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siecle (1999), Literature, Technology and Modernity (2004), Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (2009), and The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (2015). He edited Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel for Oxford World's Classics, and he is completing a new edition of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda.