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The Advent of the Killer Fog in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of Great CityThe Advent of the Killer Fog in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of Great City

Other Titles
The Advent of the Killer Fog in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of Great City
Authors
최정선
Issue Date
Apr-2023
Publisher
한국근대영미소설학회
Keywords
William Delisle Hay; The Doom of the Great City; apocalyptic narrative; Victorian cli-fi; London fog
Citation
근대영미소설, v.30, no.1, pp.139 - 159
Journal Title
근대영미소설
Volume
30
Number
1
Start Page
139
End Page
159
URI
http://scholarworks.bwise.kr/ssu/handle/2018.sw.ssu/43834
ISSN
1229-3644
Abstract
In the age of the Anthropocene, literature and literary critics are asked to participate in discussions about climate change and its consequential disasters in the Earth’s ecological systems. Literary imagination is demanded in comprehending what is happening on planet Earth and its inhabitants and educating the general public about how effectively and efficiently we humans can prevent a climate change crisis. Meanwhile, Victorian scholarship accepts the suggestion and begins to produce inventive ideas about what the cultural realm can do. Some are to retrieve the hidden works, and others try to reassess the best-selling works. This article joins this critical trend of retrieving the relatively unknown climate change literature, for instance, William Delisle Hay’s novella The Doom of the Great City. This novella centers on late-nineteenth-century London’s apocalyptic days in which the narrator witnesses on the spot the advent of the killer fog that eradicates every living entity across the urban setting. This article argues that fin-de-siècle apocalyptic narratives like The Doom of the Great City tend to present their format as a historical record or scientific data. The novella, a Victorian cli-fi narrative, aims to persuade the reader that human activities break ecological systems and climate disasters are imminent. Hay’s imaginative writing can be considered a warning against human ignorance about a reciprocal relationship between humans and planet Earth’s ecosystems. However, his cli-fi narrative shows the lack of readability in the scale and scope of emergent ecological changes. As a result, Hay’s apocalyptic narrative is caught in a moral apocalypse frame. It tends to read smog causality in a sin-punishment relationship against the given scientific knowledge.
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College of Humanities (Department of English Language & Literature)
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