Les récits de l’enclave chez H. G. Wells

Abstract

Through the analysis of three HG Wells short stories, In the Avu Observatory, The Country of the Blind, and Through a Window, this article aims at revealing how the concept of enclave is to be understood both as conflict and as contamination. Each text carefully builds an agonistic system pitting two cultural values one against the other, and the only possible outcome is the elimination of one. Proposing first a short summary of each text in order to reveal Wells’s scientific aesthetic of writing, this article then shows the deep feeling of fin de siècle at play in the short stories before concluding on the failed destabilisation of each text.