Tenth Reading Group: The Legacies, Chronologies
and Temporalities of Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow
King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building 3.07,
22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6LE
2-5pm, Friday 2 November 2018
Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow is an important collection of short stories, first published in 1895, that has slipped almost completely beneath the radar of academic research. However, for people working and writing in the SF (Sci-Fi, Speculative Fiction) field, either as practitioners, readers, game developers or individuals interested in pulp writing and book history it is a landmark text. Seen by critics such as S.T. Joshi as the text that restarted interest in a range of significant genres, specifically U.S. decadent literature and modernism, cosmic horror, and alternative future writing, it is the possible “missing” link in a genealogy that runs from Edgar Allan Poe through H.P Lovecraft to Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Margaret Atwood and others.
22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6LE
2-5pm, Friday 2 November 2018
Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow is an important collection of short stories, first published in 1895, that has slipped almost completely beneath the radar of academic research. However, for people working and writing in the SF (Sci-Fi, Speculative Fiction) field, either as practitioners, readers, game developers or individuals interested in pulp writing and book history it is a landmark text. Seen by critics such as S.T. Joshi as the text that restarted interest in a range of significant genres, specifically U.S. decadent literature and modernism, cosmic horror, and alternative future writing, it is the possible “missing” link in a genealogy that runs from Edgar Allan Poe through H.P Lovecraft to Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Margaret Atwood and others.
The first story in the collection “The Repairer of Reputations” is a prophetic vision of a future America (1920) in which a recent war with Germany and a rivalry with the only remaining major world power, Russia, has led to the expansion of America’s global and imperial power and led it to becoming a fascist state. Chambers imagines a world in which depression and negativity are outlawed, one’s social reputation defines their right to life, and suicide is legally sanctioned through the establishment of state-funded “Lethal Chambers”. In essence, “The Repairer of Reputations” is a dark satire on the rise of the eugenics movement that predates Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by almost 40 years.
Given recent critical moves towards such negative, critical frameworks as “Afropessimism”, presentism, and a renewed interest in questions of the temporal in C19 studies, the imaginative and stylistic richness of the The King in Yellow, calls for more attention to be paid to its warnings about the Twentieth Century and beyond.
Reading
To register for the reading group, please email Dr Michael Collins, [email protected].
Thanks to the generous support of King’s College London, we can offer a limited number of travel bursaries for postgraduate students and ECRs who are unwaged or on temporary and/or part time contracts. If you wish to be considered for travel funding, please note this in your email to the organiser and register by Friday 19 October.
Given recent critical moves towards such negative, critical frameworks as “Afropessimism”, presentism, and a renewed interest in questions of the temporal in C19 studies, the imaginative and stylistic richness of the The King in Yellow, calls for more attention to be paid to its warnings about the Twentieth Century and beyond.
Reading
- Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895). Available as an online e text here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492-h/8492-h.htm. We recommend the Wordsworth edition, with an introduction by David Stuart Davies.
- Secondary readings to be provided to all participants in advance.
To register for the reading group, please email Dr Michael Collins, [email protected].
Thanks to the generous support of King’s College London, we can offer a limited number of travel bursaries for postgraduate students and ECRs who are unwaged or on temporary and/or part time contracts. If you wish to be considered for travel funding, please note this in your email to the organiser and register by Friday 19 October.
