Readers familiar with Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may not know that dozens of equally remarkable Gothic texts were written in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth-century. This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siècle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative 'abhuman' identity in its place. She shows that such representations of Gothic bodies are strongly indebted to those found in nineteenth-century biology and social medicine, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, standing in opportunistic relation to nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.

Poor survival on plants can limit the efficacy of Biological Control Agents (BCAs) in the field. Yet bacteria survive in the atmosphere, despite their exposure to high solar radiation and extreme temperatures. If conditions in the atmosphere are similar to, or more extreme than, the environmental conditions on the plant surface, then precipitation may serve as a reservoir of robust BCAs. To test this hypothesis, two hundred and fifty-four rain-borne isolates were screened for in vitro inhibition of Erwinia amylovora, the causal agent of fire blight, as well as of other plant pathogenic bacteria, fungi and oomycetes. Two isolates showed strong activity against E. amylovora and other plant pathogenic bacteria, while other isolates showed activity against fungal and oomycete pathogens. Survival assays suggested that the two isolates that inhibited E. amylovora were able to survive on apple blossoms and branches similarly to E. amylovora. Pathogen population size and associated fire blight symptoms were significantly reduced when detached apple blossoms were treated with the two isolates before pathogen inoculation, however, disease reduction on attached blossoms within an orchard was inconsistent. Using whole genome sequencing, the isolates were identified as Pantoea agglomerans and P. ananatis, respectively. A UV-mutagenesis screen pointed to a phenazine antibiotic D-alanylgriseoluteic acid synthesis gene cluster as being at the base of the antimicrobial activity of the P. agglomerans isolate. Our work reveals the potential of precipitation as an under-explored source of BCAs, whole genome sequencing as an effective approach to precisely identify BCAs, and UVmutagenesis as a technically simple screen to investigate the genetic basis of BCAs. More field trials are needed to determine the efficacy of the identified BCAs in fire blight control.

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Some of the most innovative works of fiction in the British anti-realist tradition can be found amongst popular genres-Gothic Horror, sensation fiction, science fiction-at the fin de siècle. Strongly influenced by such scientific and sociomedical discourses as evolutionism, degeneration theory, and psychology, fin-de-siècle popular literature challenged traditional conceptions of human identity at every level: by theorising human species identity as both hybridised and metamorphic (H. G. Wells's 1896 The Island of Dr Moreau, John Buchan's 1898 'No-Man's-Land'); in its representations of an admixed, fluctuable, even chaotic human body (M. P. Shiel's 1895 'Huguenin's Wife', Richard Marsh's 1897 The Beetle); in its speculations on the incoherence of a human subjectivity fractured by the unconscious (Joseph Hocking's 1890 The Weapons of Mystery, Arthur Conan Doyle's 1894 The Parasite). The innovation of such texts does not merely consist in thematic treatments of a dangerously unstable human identity. They engage in narrative experimentation more consistently than their mainstream contemporary counterparts within the realist or naturalist tradition, foregrounding issues of narrativity, refusing to lay claim to narrative objectivity or omniscience, renouncing verisimilitude and narrative logic in favour of the production of sensation and affect. For example, witness the intricate nesting of interpolated story within story in Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1890) or Ernest R. Suffling's The Decameron of a Hypnotist (1898), the deployment of textual 'editors' and/or multiple narrative perspectives in such novels as H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), or the deliberately alogical narrative structure of Gothic picaresque novels like Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Dynamiter (1885) and Machen's The Three Imposters (1895). Whether understood as proto-modernist or early modernist, the A. Smith et al. (eds.