Date of Award

Summer 2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Committee Director

Marc Ouellette

Committee Member

Julia Romberger

Committee Member

Thomas Chapman

Abstract

This project investigates representations of the ecological and Imperialist relationships in a selection of serialized crime fiction texts: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures (appearing in The Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly beginning in 1891). I examine serialized crime fiction published in the nineteenth century as a map of the ecological and Imperialist relationships established through the nineteenth-century British publishing industry. Serialized crime fiction was both popular and profitable, representing not only commercial success but one that tapped into the reading populace’s imagination. Readers craved serialized stories from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle where installments tantalized the next issue even before the presses had begun to print. Research, like the seminal work of Hughes and Lund, has expounded upon the effects of reading and literacy on the middle class. Taking that research into account, this study identifies and expounds on the effect of non-human matter (flora, fauna, waste, metals) on the methods of production, which in turn affect the narratives that appear in the periodicals.

Each chapter maps three essential assemblages of the nineteenth-century publishing industry (paper, metal, and waste) and establishes the relational qualities that comprise them. Close readings of each of the serialized crime fiction texts— combined with explications of the three essential assemblage relationships — demonstrate where these relationships are present. I focus on the method of publication in addition to the stories themselves because the mode of delivery mimics the ecological and Imperialist assemblages at work during the time. The nineteenth-century British publishing industry, which produced these periodicals, was an assemblage of local and far-flung materials and smaller assemblages: rags, fibers, ink, stationers, waste, pollution, paper mills, miners, importers and exporters, enslavement in the American South, to name just a few. I focus on just three elements of this assemblage (paper, metal, and waste) and use cartographic terms to map out the relationships that make them up, constitute them, and reconstitute them. Others have established how anxieties of empire and Imperialism appear in crime stories, most notably visible in Sherlock Holmes stories, in terms of straight plot and characters. I build off those analyses when I look beneath the overt characters and plots to unearth the interstitial moments of ecological and Imperial relationships in less overt textual moments, including the narrative structure.

Finally, an Esri StoryMap (https://arcg.is/0ann4f0) animates the dynamic relationships to further demonstrate the way these relationships are embedded in the text and further conversations about how literary analysis may be visualized and experienced. Employing the language of assemblage theory and new materialism, the study’s purpose is to demonstrate how a rhizomatic mapping framework is well-suited to explain the fragmented and volatile nineteenth-century British publishing industry and to analyze serialized crime fiction of the day. One of the broad primary interests of this study, therefore, is to accurately account for the environmental and Imperial factors that comprise the assemblages which press upon and affect the literature created. The project ends with an application of rhizomatic mapping to generative AI tool creation, indicating where this research will go in the future.

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In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/t596-3p03

ISBN

9798384453277

ORCID

0000-0003-2605-7542

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