2025 Theses Doctoral

Scenes of Infinite Decay: Description, Ecology, and the Victorian Weird

Macvarish, Richard Bruce C.

This dissertation considers the emergence and development of weird fiction in nineteenth-century British literature, offering a formal literary history of a genre more often approached as a cognitive framework for philosophy or ecological critique.

Drawing on formalist analyses of science fiction, fin de siècle decadence, and literary realism, this study explores weird fiction’s coherence around a set of identifiable narrative strategies, namely the prioritization of scenic description over emplotment and the representation of extreme atmospheres, affects and bodily sensations. It is through prolonged, disorienting expressions of place and atmosphere that weird fiction generates its signature affect of “cosmic fear:” a visceral, embodied disturbance in the face of a vast, sentient, and unknowable nonhuman environment.

Through case studies of works by H.P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Alfred Tennyson, H.G. Wells, and Algernon Blackwood, this project shows how weird fiction transformed Victorian literary forms to make sense of the ontological destabilizations wrought by nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, geology, and astrophysics. By theorizing weird fiction as a both genre with a recoverable literary history and a mode of ecological thinking, the project seeks to contribute to the growing body of scholarship historicizing the Anthropocene and its aesthetic forms. In particular, it frames weird fiction’s twenty-first century resurgence across literature, media, and theory as a powerful, if unexpected, return to the representational resources of the nineteenth century.