The Invisible Man a Grotesque Romance

by Wells, H. G.; Stover, Leon E.

• ISBN13: 9780786468713
• ISBN10: 0786468718
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-18
• Publisher: McFarland Publishing

Summary

H.G. Wells barely revised The Invisible Man once it was published, adding only an epilogue. But the opening statement of that epilogue--So ends the strange and evil experiment of the Invisible Man--has posed challenges to scholars. How to understand it? Does it speak strictly to the scientific elements of the novel? Or is it a part of the work's political underpinnings? The 1897 New York first edition (the first edition to incorporate the epilogue) is used here as the basis for the exhaustive annotations and other critical apparatus of the world's foremost Wellsian scholar. The introduction examines in great detail the novel's position in the Wellsian canon and sets the major themes in context with the literary conventions used in his other works, particularly the scientific romances. H.G. Wells' novel, a scientific romance, attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast Invasion from Mars by the redoubtable Orson Welles. It was also notably made into an early fifties science fiction adventure movie (and there have been other adaptations as well). So indelible is the association that the novel, like the panic inducing broadcast and the Hollywood flick, now is taken as little more than a light fantasy of outerspace terror and human heroism. This is far from the author's original vision. Like the other scientific romances treated in the Annotated H.G. Wells series, The War of the Worlds is a philosophical tale and as such, is profoundly ideological. The world of the Martians represents the progressive future of humanity in a cultural war with our world of tradition and reaction--these are the two worlds in question. The Mars from which the invaders come is united by a planet-wide system of irrigation canals; for Wells this indicates a socialist world-state, as claimed by the American astronomer Percival Lowell. The red planet is red in more than one sense, pointing the direction of terrestrial progress. The Martians in the novel are octopoidal monsters, bodily anticipating the tentacular, all-controlling totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. To those familiar with Wells' works only through film, this acclaimed series annotated by the world's premier Wellsian scholar, Leon Stover, will be a real eye-opener. The historical, philosophical, and literary contexts of Wells' scientific romances are thoroughly examined. All editions are in library binding, with an introduction, appendices, bibliography and index.