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This article examines the way visions of the Yellow Peril upend the metanarratives of liberal secularism, via a reading of Richard Marsh's 1901 novel, The Joss: A Reversion . Following the movements of a bloodthirsty East Asian cult, The Joss occasions reflection on the extent to which its Orientalized villains continue to shape a secular project that remains indebted to Christianity. Against the backdrop of the Victorian empire's turn to secularism, Marsh's novel anticipates what I call the unsecular yellow, a visual field whose sinister occupants pull the basis for post-Christian secular dominion away from tolerant universalism and toward stark racial binaries. Foreshadowing the anti-Asian paranoia of today's religious and post-religious right, The Joss prompts consideration of how contemporary talk of massing Asian bodies reinvigorates the late Victorian intertwining of secular and Christian conceptions of yellow heathenness.

This article analyzes the hysterical narration styles of two major characters in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) to reveal the ways late-Victorian discourses attempted (and often failed) to distance particular social anxieties from their modern origins. Attending to previous literary criticism regarding socially Othered groups of this period—racialized foreigners, New Women, and the urban poor—as well as (pseudo)scientific studies from the 1870s–80s, this reading notes the ways that Victorian cultural biases surrounding race, gender, and class could be projected onto Gothicized, Orientalized figures in literary texts. Pairing a postcolonial examination of the novel’s spatial and temporal elements with a psychoanalytic reading of this text, I argue that the slowing pace in Robert Holt’s narrative and the compulsive repetition of Marjorie Lindon’s both reflect the novel’s disruption of space and time and structurally parallel the symptoms of a “hallucinatory hysterical attack,” as conceived by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud. Together, these hysterical narratives reveal the failure of particular cultural and scientific discourses to completely bury Victorian anxieties about modernity into different, explicitly Othered spaces and times by collapsing both space and time in the narration of psychic trauma.

The titular antagonists of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897) embody a queer repudiation of reproductive futurity through an erotic logic that ends not in reproduction but in monstrous consumption. Existing across and recalling a vast history, the characters of Dracula and the Beetle stand in opposition to the progress- and procreation-oriented culture of fin-de-siècle England. This paper examines the Gothic queerness of stopped time, arguing that a subtle figuration of these characters as trans- underlies their radical break from a contemporary eugenic logic. A trans- impulse in these texts—one that encompasses taxonomic, temporal, and gender boundaries—initially marks the monstrous body but ultimately engulfs the English subject.

This essay examines two little-known agents operating within the juvenile publishing market of the 1880s: the quality boys’ weekly Union Jack (1880–83) and one of its key contributors, Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915). Heldmann’s apprenticeship on the staff of the Union Jack prepared him for a successful second career as “Richard Marsh,” a bestselling author of gothic and crime stories for the adult market. It provided him with an acute understanding of the niche marketing of periodicals and genre fiction, the production of serial and short stories, and the uses of formula fiction. Yet, at the same time, Heldmann’s work increasingly challenged notions of “healthy” juvenile fiction by introducing elements of emotionality, homoeroticism, crime, and horror, most notably in his final serial, “A Couple of Scamps” (1882–83). Heldmann’s apparent popularity and business sense challenge the current scholarly assumption that turn-of-the-century boys’ fiction did not feature emotional male relationships.

Far from an alliance of two direatening female figures, die Beede's abduction - and, one presumes, rape- of Marjorie is hard also to read as die latter being freed from deadening convention; judging by die Beede's past habits, women are fodder for human sacrifice to Isis (whereas men are kept alive as sexual slaves). When the Beede vanishes during the climactic train wreck, she leaves nothing behind but \"huge blotches, - stains of some sort [. . .] damp, and [giving out] a most unpleasant smell,\" construed by \"experts\" to be either \"human blood\" \"parboiled\" by die heat of die explosion, blood of \"some wild animal, - possibly of some creature of the cat species,\" or die \"excretion of some variety of lizard\" (318).

On its publication in 1897 Richard Marsh’s The Beetle was more popular than Dracula. However, in the latter part of the twentieth century its popularity with both readers and critics waned, and it is only now that Marsh’s story of the Egyptian beetle-creature seeking vengeance on a British politician is attracting renewed critical interest. It is not my intention here to take serious issue with any of these important and revealing critical discussions, which variously explore the novel in terms of fears over ‘reverse colonisation’; depictions of the ‘abhumanness’ of the female body; and cultural debates on the nature and significance of trance-states. Rather, I wish to open up discussion of the novel by identifying some of the important and peculiar features of this – admittedly very peculiar – novel, that have not so far received the attention they deserve. These thus-far critically neglected features include: the significance of the opening chapters’ emphases upon vagrancy and destitution; the novel’s exploration of ‘political authority’ and its ambivalence towards its central male character, the liberal politician; and the representation of the New Woman. More specifically I wish to investigate the historical and ideological motivations for what I consider to be the novel’s conflation of its New Woman character with the figure of the emasculated and vagrant clerk.