Narratives Seminar: Redefining Manliness: Wells’s Speculative Plant Tales in Periodicals

12th Mar 2025 5:30pm - 7pm

Multiple locations Campus

QA138, Queen Anne Building, Park Row, Old Royal Naval College, SE10 9LS

The Centre for Research in Language and Heritage (CREL) is delighted to welcome our very own PhD student, Chetna Jena who brings the next instalment of the CREL Narratives Seminar Series.

Abstract

H. G. Wells is perhaps not the first author that springs to mind when exploring proto-environmental thought in the Victorian period. While his active role in popularising science through articles, reviews, short stories, serialised novels is widely recognised by critics like Simon James and Will Tattersdill, Wells’s engagement with nineteenth-century botanical ideas in periodicals remains a largely understudied area. This paper not only acknowledges Wells as a significant scientific contributor but seeks to recentre him as a writer who extrapolated on botanical debates in the creation of speculative plant tales that destabilise anthropocentric attitudes. By considering his rich repertoire of stories, featuring the alluring or deadly plant, that appear in The Daily Chronicle (1872-1930), Collier’s Weekly (1888-1957), and The Strand Magazine (1891-1950), this paper will also examine periodicals as dynamic sites where contemporary ideas about vegetal life and gender become increasingly entangled. Place becomes integral here in two respects: the positioning of Wells’s works in the wider periodical that impacted how they were read and the place of men in society that is constantly negotiated through lateral convergences observed between texts. By focusing on how Wells’s writings contribute to the ongoing dialogue about gender roles through varied representations of human interactions with the natural world, this paper aims to show how they simultaneously drew attention to the buried story of plants, inadvertently advocating their vitality.

Bio

I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Greenwich working on a thesis that explores the narrative functionality of flora in the speculative fiction of H. G. Wells. I aim to situate his works within changing perceptions of botanical life in fin de siècle Britain and demonstrate a strong connection between nineteenth-century fascination with flora and the crisis of masculinity. My main research interests include human-plant entanglements and the intersection of science and literature in late-Victorian fiction.

This event is Hybrid  - Join the meeting online Here or register below to attend in person

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