Full Description
The Coming Race is the crowning achievement of the genre of hollow earth fiction, in which a hero makes a perilous journey underground and discovers a superior race. The customs and political systems of these "aliens from inner space" are researched and contrasted with the deficient practices of old-fashioned, muddling, imperfect humanity. The subterranean race in this novel, the Vril-ya, are seemingly angelic creatures whose amazing powers come from their harnessing of a force called Vril. Bulwer's novel is unequaled for the depth of its intellectual explorations—inquiries into an astonishing range of social, political, scientific, religious, linguistic, and sexual issues that are enabled by the hollow earth plot.
The novel is accompanied and illuminated in this edition by a broad range of historical materials on evolution, electromagnetism, gender roles, and nineteenth-century science fiction.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Edward Bulwer Lytton: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text
The Coming Race
Appendix A: Bulwer's Letters on The Coming Race
Appendix B: Reviews
The Examiner (3 June 1871)
The Illustrated London News (8 July 1871)
The Times (30 August 1871)
Appendix C: Nineteenth-Century Science and Adventure Fiction
From John Cleves Symmes, Symzonia:A Voyage of Discovery (1820)
From Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864)
From Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
From H. Rider Haggard, She (1887)
From H.G.Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
Appendix D: Nineteenth-Century Theories of Electricity
From Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831-52)
From James Clerk Maxwell, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865)
Appendix E: Evolution and Inheritance
From Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (1809)
From Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)
From Thomas Huxley, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863)
From Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869)
From Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
Appendix F: From Max Müller, "On the Stratification of Language" (1868)
Appendix G: Sexual Politics and the "Woman Question"
From Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
From Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (1854-63)
From John Ruskin, "Of Queens' Gardens" (1865)
From Eliza Lynn Linton, "The Girl of the Period" (1868)
From John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869)
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