Paweł Stachura
Atom as the Next Frontier: Literary Materialism in Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858) and Ray Cummings’s “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (1919)
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 17 (2023), pp. 77-95

Abstract: The article is a comparison of settings in two intertextually linked stories about the universe in an atom: Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858) and Ray Cummings’s “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (1919). The argument is that fictional representations of microscopic structure of matter were influenced both by contemporary science and by contemporary imagery of the American frontier, linking both stories to literary representations of the American West. The article presents a number of popular-science texts as possible influences, especially on Cummings’s story. The theoretical background is based on Gaston Bachelard’s concept of cognitive obstacles, and on the recent theories of “cultural materialism.” The comparison of atomic imagery in both stories suggests that the changing scientific ideas about the atom, which the stories obviously reflect, could be combined with the changing image of Western adventure and its frontier setting, as if there was an uncanny compatibility between the two seemingly distant realms of imagination.

Keywords: atom, Fitz-James O’Brien, Ray Cummings, materialism, Gaston Bachelard

DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.17/2023.06

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