How does the supernatural or anti-realist fiction contribute to the realist project?

This dissertation will argue that works from genres historically considered to be anti-realist - the Victorian Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, and horror - are in fact taking up the same realist project as more readily accepted realist novels. One might assume that since a particular work does not overwhelmingly attempt to mimetically represent reality, to be objective, it then does not actually say anything about the process of representation. I would argue that the opposite is in fact true and it is precisely because many of these works contain strains of the "realistic" and the "fantastic" that they are able to reflect back upon a debate surrounding one's ability to capture reality, to perceive it and represent it in conventional ways. The realist project as recast by critics such as George Levine does not just attempt to produce the real but rather questions its very nature. It is a generative and volatile process rather than rote mimetic representation.

It is no coincidence, then, that in several of these narratives, figures of objectivity are the protagonists at the very center. Jack Griffin, Sherlock Holmes, the Time Traveller, and....are all men of science who encounter cases of the supernatural.

Griffin, in testing the limits of reality, renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. The epistemological crisis HG Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.

Sherlock Holmes, while identifying himself as a professional detective, is one by way of science. In the first novel to feature Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle portrays the detective as a man so struck by curiosity and so unbounded by institutionally perpetuated assumptions about reality that he, like Griffin, conducts experiments in private. His unmatched skills of detection are directly dependent on his empirical approach, but an empirical approach not restricted by assumptions about reality. He also faces several seemingly supernatural cases, and his powers of deductive reasoning are often described in supernatural terms, as if his conclusions are acts of divination more than exercises in observation and logic. When Watson describes an article written by Holmes, for example, he says "It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity."

The Time Traveller of HG Wells' The Time Machine shares a similar approach to experimentation. His method is strictly scientific but manages to question the very fabric of time and our normal conceptions of how we move in space and time.