Securing Britain: Figures of invasion in late Victorian and Edwardian fiction

My project examines the pre-World War One British invasion narrative, a little-studied popular genre that depicts French, Russian, and German attacks on England and on the territories of the British Empire. I argue that the motifs and concerns of this sub-canonical Tory-Conservative genre are most complexly realized in canonical texts. My primary examples are works by Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells. Although these three writers registered a set of common concerns over dangers posed to England, their perspectives differed: Kipling, who was born in India, was a proponent of British military prowess and of the empire; Wells, a native Englishman and a socialist, opposed British imperialism; Conrad, an emigre from Russian-occupied Poland, wrote of an endangered England from the perspective of a people for whom invasion and subjugation were lived experiences.;In chapter one, I provide an historical overview and a typology of the invasion narrative. In chapter two, I discuss Kipling's Kim (1901), whose political theme is potential Russian "theft" of British territory in northwest India, and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), which represents the Sussex coast as a choice site for landings of hostile forces. In chapter three, I argue that Conrad deployed the motifs of invasion literature in The Secret Agent (1907) in order to condescend to the new mass reading public and to play out, in a displaced way, his own nationalistic preoccupations (Poland had been an occupied territory since the eighteenth century). In chapter four, I argue that The War of the Worlds (1898) was inspired by a series of invasion narratives. I further contend that Wells' anxieties over encroachments on English sovereignty are displayed in his preference for indigenous socialism (Owenism) over continental socialism (Marxism) and in his resistance to Henry James' attempts to "occupy" the English novel with French methods and standards of judgment. My discussion focuses on Tono-Bungay (1909), which militaristically figures a variety of Edwardian social and political phenomena, including the new plutocracy's supplanting of the landed gentry and the rise of consumer society.