My dissertation “Failure and Finitude: Existentialism in Fin-de-Siècle Britain” reveals the rise of existentialism in fin de siécle British literature. The technological, imperial, and conceptual developments over Queen Victoria’s reign were unprecedented up to that point in human history, and as her reign neared its end most British subjects looked back on the 19th century with a sense of pride and looked forward to the 20th century with nearly unbridled optimism. These massive changes were met with skepticism by the authors Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and G. K. Chesterton. In response, these authors developed individual existentialisms marked by a shared interest in failure. Recognizing Conrad, Hardy, and Chesterton as existentialists enables us to make sense of where these authors fit in literary history. Emphasizing subjective experience and the collision of mind and matter, these authors prioritize neither the materialism of their contemporaries nor the innovative psychological experimentations of the modernists. Rejecting a critical tendency to see these writers as transitional between two major literary movements, my project places them within the existential tradition, following the likes of Fyodor Dostoevsky and preceding Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. I extend scholarly discussions of existential thought by foregrounding and evaluating the distinctive formal, narrative, and figurative tools that make the novel uniquely suited to exploring existential problems.

To accomplish this, I developed a methodology I call double reading. In this method I use theoretical frames to read texts and then use those texts to challenge and reveal the limitations of those theoretical frames. This method acknowledges the unique features of both mediums, where the tools available to philosophers and those available to novelists allows them to develop different aspects of existentialism. Existential novelists take advantage of their medium’s capabilities of affecting readers to communicate the emotions, moods, uncertainties and feelings that accompany the existential experience. For instance, the novel form allows Joseph Conrad to craft the experience of existential horror without needing to provide a definition. Rather, Conrad uses the frame narrative, repetition, and metaphor to make us feel and experience existential horror as we read. I then use Conrad’s concept of existential horror to expand our understanding of Camus’s concept of the absurd. This method recognizes that existential horror and the absurd are related concepts, but not equivalent. Thus, I argue, existential horror should be placed alongside concepts like the absurd and nausea in our accounts of existential thought.

As I revise and expand my dissertation into a book manuscript, I will show how British existentialism lays the groundwork for literary modernism. While modernism is often seen as a response to the horrors of World War I, my excavation of existentialism in the latter half on the 19th century and into the first few years of the 20th shows that the roots of modernism began earlier. Working from Virginia Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction” I show how she identifies the change in human character with the British existential novels my project studies. Reframing Woolf in the British existential tradition reveals ho the desire to represent subjective human experience drove modernist narrative experimentation.

In my next project, I plan on tracing the existential novel to its emergence pre-Civil Rights era African American literature. While my current project is focused on the development of existentialism in England, it places that existentialism within a transnational tradition of Russian, British and French existential novelists. This tradition emerges in America in the novels of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. This project will combine an existential ethics with African diasporic existentialism to develop a theoretic background to frame my double reading. I will show how the novel form offers a rich means of expressing existential views on ethics and racial justice emerging from African American experiences.