William Hope Hodgson's borderlands: monstrosity, other worlds, and the future at the fin de siècle.

William Hope Hodgson has generally been understood as the author of several atmospheric sea-horror stories and two powerful but flawed horror science fiction novels. There has been no substantial study analysing the historical and cultural context of his fiction or its place in the Gothic, horror, and science fiction literary traditions. Through analysing the theme of borderlands, this thesis contextualises Hodgson’s novels and short stories within these traditions and within late Victorian cultural discourse. Liminal other world realms, boundaries of corporeal monstrosity, and the imagined future of the world form key elements of Hodgson’s fiction, reflecting the currents of anxiety and optimism characterising fin-de-siècle British society. Hodgson’s early career as a sailor and his interest in body-building and physical culture colour his fiction. Fin-de-siècle discourses of evolution, entropy, spiritualism, psychical research, and the occult also influence his ideas. In The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912), the known world brushes against other forms of reality, exposing humanity to incomprehensible horrors. In The Ghost Pirates (1909), the sea forms a liminal region on the borderland of materiality and immateriality in which other world encounters can take place. In The Night Land and The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), evolution gives rise to strange monstrous forms existing on the borderlines of species and identity. In Hodgson’s science fiction—The House on the Borderland and The Night Land—the future of the earth forms a temporal borderland of human existence shaped by fin-de-siècle fears of entropy and the heat-death of the sun. Alongside the work of other writers such as H. G. Wells and Arthur Machen, Hodgson’s four novels respond to the borderland discourses of the fin de siècle, better enabling us to understand the Gothic literature of the period as well as Hodgson’s position as a writer who offers a unique imaginative perspective on his contemporary culture.

Sole plate fixing details for modern methods of timber construction.

In order to resist lateral loads, modern methods of timber construction are reliant on the in-plane shear strength of the walls orientated parallel to the applied action. In closed panel systems, the shear stresses are transferred to the foundations by the sole plate through the sheathing board, which is usually mechanically jointed to the timber frame. Since closed panels are delivered to site as single units, access to the internal bottom rail is rather restricted and novel, efficient solutions to secure the panel to the substrate are required. Sole plate fixing components for open and closed panel systems were tested in isolation and combination in order to validate a simplistic version of the weakest link theory. As a result, findings were embedded into a software database with a direct link to a previously developed sole plate and racking design application. This integrated process facilitates the structural optimization of the sole plate detail.