Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction
Kate Holterhoff
Although authors of fin-de-siècle romance fiction characterized the horrors and wonders conventional to this literary form as exceeding the bounds of human perception and understanding, the illustrations which accompanied them suggest that, when it comes to visual paratexts, quite the opposite was thought to be the case. Indescribable scenesenergized these illustrators because rendering wild-minded technologies, lands, creatures, peoples, and circumstances graphically liberated artists to add both concrete detail and greater mystery to these incredible stories. Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction examines the significance of images commissioned to supplement romance fictions published in Britain and America between 1885 and 1920 by five of the period’s most popular and imaginative authors. This book studies the lavish pictures created to complement fictions by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, and James De Mille, not only for their initial serialization in Anglo-American periodicals, but also in subsequent publications, in order to better understand illustration’s impact on literary and cultural history.
Kate Holterhoff is an Affiliated Researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research areas include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British romance fiction, visual culture, digital humanities, and the history of science.
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