Artificial Creation and Procreation in Late-Victorian Short Fiction

This thesis investigates the connections between creativity and childbirth in fin-de-siècle short fiction. It questions how late-Victorian perceptions of gender, sexuality, science, and art informed the fashion in which artificial and biological creation were represented in the literature of the time. The corpus under consideration includes short stories and novellas by H. G. Wells, R. L. Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and James Matthew Barrie.

These narratives are characterised by a choreography of association and dissociation between the spheres of artificial creation and procreation. They also depict the act of conception as a strictly autonomous – and masculine – endeavour. Arguably, these representations are indicative of various socio-political, aesthetic, and philosophical stakes at play during the fin de siècle, as men’s and women’s abilities to conceive – in the broad sense of the term – are being (re-)defined.

This study combines several theoretical frameworks, including gender studies, cultural studies, and short fiction theory, in order to identify the different threads of reflection interwoven around the question of creation, its value and function, in literature and beyond.