Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I:Reading the Fourth Dimension; 1. Imagining 'Something Perfectly New': Problems of Language, Conception and Perception; 2. Constructing the Fourth Dimension: the First Series of the Scientific Romances; 3. The Four-Dimensional Self: Personal, Political and Untimely; Part II:Reading Through the Fourth Dimension; 4. Four-Dimensional Consciousness: the Correspondence between William James and Charles Howard Hinton; 5. H. G. Wells's Four-Dimensional Literary Aesthetic; 6. Exceeding 'the Trap of the Reflexive': Henry James's Dimensions of Consciousness; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.

Promotional Information

First book-length examination of the impact of pre-Relativity, four-dimensional theory on literature and culture at the turn of the twentieth century.

About the Author

Elizabeth Throesch received her PhD from the University of Leeds in 2007. She has published articles and book chapters on Lewis Carroll, Herbert Spencer and Charles Howard Hinton, among others.

Reviews

Journal Science Fiction Studies

This lively and daring book connects several socio-historical threads in late-nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Most importantly, how did the idea of the fourth dimension pass from the field of analytical geometry to that of fiction, psychology, and aesthetics?'
—Kate Holerhoff 'English Literature in Transition 1880–1920', Vol 61, No. 3, pp. 396–399.