Abstract

Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World (1912) and H.P. Lovecraft’s story At the Mountains of Madness (1931) imagine the discovery of supposedly extinct or entirely unknown life forms from distant periods of earth history that survived in geographically isolated places: the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica. Drawing on discussions of the notion of weird fiction, I emphasize the ambivalent role of these remnants of the geological past. While both texts transfer the colonial appropriation of isolated spaces onto a temporal axis of earth history, the reappearance of the past unsettles the identity of the Western expeditions. In The Lost World, the juxtaposition of different temporalities irritates the idea of a teleological natural history heading towards Western civilisation. At the Mountains of Madness intensifies this confusion of roles and timescales when the expedition from New England loses its privileged and distanced position towards the past and becomes the object of colonial appropriation.