Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Nicholas Daly explores the popular fiction of the "romance revival" of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, focusing on authors such as Bram Stoker, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Conan Doyle. Drawing on recent work in cultural studies, Daly argues that these adventure narratives provided a narrative of cultural change at a time when Britain was trying to accommodate the "new imperialism." The presence of a genre such as romance within modernism, he claims, should force a questioning of the usual distinction between high and popular culture.