Mr Ben Felderhof

I am researching the jungle in British fiction between c. 1885 and 1914 and the way this landscape was used to explore fin-de-siècle ideas about nature, physical, biological, social, and psychological. My PhD thesis primarily focusses on imperial romance, specifically novels and stories by Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, Hudson, Doyle, Wells, and Conrad, but I am also interested in the geography and ecology of tropical forests; exploration and travel writing in the late-Victorian period; the history of the British Empire; theories of evolution, entropy, and degeneration in literature; forest conventions in Western culture; and the role that primitivism and exoticism played in Modernism.