ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters I discussed the development of realist fiction in terms of characteristic territories (slum, suburb) and characteristic plots (degeneration, declension). I want to turn now to realism’s great opponent, romance, which had been gaining commercial and aesthetic ground steadily ever since the success of Stevenson and Rider Haggard in the 1880s (Keating 1989, pp. 344-66). Romance created a new, and equally mythic, territory: the frontiers of empire. There destinies acquired a new (but very old) shape. If naturalist plots were informed by anxieties about social decrepitude, then romance plots were informed by anxieties about the state of a ‘Derelict Empire’ (Irwin 1912). Whereas declension novels avoided naturalism, or inoculated themselves against it by incorporating degenerative episodes, the new romances took it over and turned it around.
