DEGENERATIVE DECADENCE AND REGENERATIVE MILITARISM IN THE INVASION NARRATIVES OF ROBERT W. CHAMBERS AND ERSKINE CHILDERS

This thesis explores fin de siècle theories of decadence, degeneration, criminology, and evolutionary biology, and their contemporary application to invasion literature written between 1871 and 1915. While there is significant criticism on early invasion narratives, there is little extant on Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) and Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), especially in discussing the importance of their militaristic “calls to action” to convert weak, aesthetically-inclined men into hard-working patriotic soldiers and public servants. Through this conversion, the characters of Chambers and Childers serve as important role models that exemplify Max Nordau’s ideal “all-American boy” and “right-living Englishman,” convincing decadent, unprepared governments to properly prepare for an imminent Great War. However, as much of Anglo-European society ignores these signs, the warnings outlined by Chambers and Childers predict the destructive consequences of World War I and the psychological disassociation of the Modernist period.