English Language and Literature ETDs

Publication Date

5-30-1951

Abstract

The following dissertation has two primary purposes. The first is to plead for a recognition of the scientific romance as an independent genre in the school of the novel. The second purpose is to examine the twentieth-century examples of the scientific romance. Although I have gone rather thoroughly into the matter of defining the "scientific romance" in the first chapter, it would be well here to give a brief, general definition of the form. A scientific romance is an imaginative story which employs as its background or framework extensions of facts of actual or hypothetical science. The science thus utilized may be physical science, social science, or, occasionally, metaphysical science. This definition has to be qualified, which I have done in the first chapter. In trying to establish the scientific romance as a genre, I have deliberately put myself to further the work of Professors Marjorie Nicolson and J. O. Bailey, and, as Bailey's work Pilgrims Through Space and Time does throughout, this dissertation ignores a distinct division into national boundaries within the scientific romance in the earlier chapters.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

William Price Albrecht

Second Committee Member

Willis Dana Jacobs

Third Committee Member

Cecil Vivian Wicker

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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