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This article investigates the metaphorical representation of child sexual abuse (CSA) in contemporary children's and young adult gothic works, focusing on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events and Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series. It argues that because of the upsetting nature of the issue and the numerous myths surrounding it, cultural production often uses the gothic figure of the monster who preys on children to address CSA indirectly, and identifies this strategy in the above series. It reveals a distinctly sexual charge to the monsters' victimisation of the children in both sets of narratives and explores their tendency to perpetuate CSA myths such as that of the perpetrator as a monstrous stranger. In conclusion, it considers how these narratives also challenge CSA myths and offer models of resilient child survivors, and it draws on cognitive cultural theory to theorise potential reader/viewer responses. Through its metaphorical imbrication of real-world brutality and dark fantasy, the Gothic is ultimately theorised as potentially affording more scope than realist treatments for touching on issues of transgression for wider and younger audiences, and sometimes in affirmative ways that move beyond merely recirculating myths and panic.

A key text of the pre-First World War invasion fiction genre, William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906) is often assumed to have sold in vast quantities and provoked major controversy. This article investigates the circulation and social impact of this divisive, polemical work before and during the war to provide a more accurate account of its reception. Using Marie Corelli’s proven bestseller The Sorrows of Satan (1895) as a comparator, the article shows sales of The Invasion of 1910 were similar to other bestselling novels, though not comparable to Corelli’s phenomenal sales. Le Queux’s text, however, punched above the weight of the typical bestseller in terms of its social influence, receiving parliamentary censure, extensive newspaper coverage, wide satire and polarised reader responses. Overall, this analysis provides insight into the workings of the popular fiction industry and the nature and extent of invasion fears in the early twentieth century.

The Introduction prefaces a double special issue of Critical Survey examining the work of controversial popular author, journalist and amateur spy William Le Queux from 1880 to 1920. Known as the ‘master of mystery’, Le Queux was prominent in transmitting exaggerated fears about British national security before, during and after the First World War. The Introduction provides a historical and literary framework for the special issue and outlines its central premises: that cultural production in Le Queux’s era was intimately connected with contemporary socio-political forces; that this relationship was well understood by authors such as Le Queux, and often exploited for propagandist purposes; and that the resulting literary efforts were sometimes successful in influencing public opinion. The Introduction also outlines the overall finding that Le Queux’s work tended to distort his subject matter, misinform his readership, and blur the lines between fact and fiction in pursuit of his defencist agenda.

In the late-nineteenth century the origins of the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA) started to emerge in a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children, especially in the new science of sexology. The concept was also shaped in sensational journalism and popular fiction which dramatically exploited the medico-legal theories in works that reached a wide audience. Within this set of overlapping discourses, this article identifies the developing characterisation of the abuser, or ‘paedophile’, as an outsider or stranger in order to provide distance from the uncomfortable reality that CSA is typically perpetrated by family members or others well known to the victims. The article also argues that much writing about sexual harm to children, including the factual treatments, often drew on the dark metaphors of gothic writing to avoid addressing this difficult subject explicitly. In this way the figure of the monster came to stand in for the perpetrator of sexual crimes against children, with the result that the paedophile was portrayed not just as a social outsider, but as a monstrous stranger – creating a persistent, detrimental myth which kept social attention away from the most common types of abuse. Royal Irish Academy (RIA) 2021-04-08 JG: Unpublished when uploaded -- double-check citation info and issue date on check date; DOI; set -text.

This article introduces readers to the fiction of invasion, a paranoid literary phenomenon that responded to widespread social concerns about the possible invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period between 1870 and 1914. It begins with an overview of the development of this relatively unknown body of work in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, charting assumptions of imminent large-scale war, fascination with the technology of warfare and the marked participation of military men who used the fiction to agitate for increased defence spending. While this alarmist brand of popular fiction provoked considerable contemporary commentary, modern critical engagement with it has been somewhat limited. Beginning in the 1960s and dominated by the work of the master bibliographer I. F. Clarke, the initial scholarly response necessarily took the form of classification and survey and evinced particular interest in adjudging the accuracy of fictional predictions about future war. More recent scholarship is concerned with reading the fiction in the context of its own times, probing its relationship with external imperial factors and internal domestic concerns and its effectiveness as a propaganda tool. In addition to offering an overview of this line of enquiry, this article seeks to broaden the understanding of the invasion narrative in fin-de-siecle popular fiction, drawing lines out to the recurrence of the invasion theme across a broad range of genres and modes exceeding that of future war fiction and including so-called ‘yellow peril’ narratives, crime and detective fiction and the gothic. In conclusion, a number of avenues complementing the textual and the historical are suggested for future exploration.