The Lost Race Romance: What and Why? (And Why Not Anymore?)

The Lost Race Romance is a genre of popular fiction that began flourishing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and continued vigorously through the 1920s.  In the '30s the genre began to decline, and after the second World War it became all but extinct.  The premise of the Lost Race romance entails members of a first-world nation (usually Britain, the United States, or Australia) traveling to a remote and uncharted area of the world and discovering an ancient culture that by virtue of its isolation has remained more or less unchanged for millenia.  The most popular cultures of antiquity to be used by writers of the genre were Incas, Egyptians, Atlanteans, Romans, Vikings, and Israelites: but there are also examples of Crusaders, Himyarites, Aztecs, Greeks, Lemurians, Phoenicians, and even Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal peoples.  A number of individuals writing in this genre became considerably popular: the novels H. Rider Haggard (She, King Solomon's Mines), Edgar Rice Burroughs (many of the Tarzan titles), and Abraham Merritt (The Dwellers in the Mirage, The Moon Pool) have never gone out of print.  Others have been reprinted (finally!) in more recent times in response to an interest in the history of fantastic literature (Arno Press' Lost Race and Adult Fantasy Series and Kessinger Publications both have extensive catalogs of more obscure titles).

Related to, and often overlapping, the Lost Race genre is the Lost World genre.  This entails explorers stumbling upon an isolated area of the world where prehistoric megafauna still thrive.  The best known example of this genre is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World; and taking their cue from Jules Verne many writers of Lost World epics set their tales in a subterranean world (such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' At the Earth's Core).

How did these genres come into being, and why were they popular for a time?  For a start, their literary antecedents were the utopian fictions (such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis) and fantastic voyage satires (the premier example being Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Even as late at 1901, Robert Ames Bennett's Lost Race classic Thyra: a Romance of the Polar Pit still contains elements taken from the utopian writings.  But, unlike true utopian fiction, Lost Race Romances are not ultimately didactic in aim: they are escapist adventures aimed at a mass (and often juvenile) audience.  As such, they reflect many of the trends in Western society which were taking place at that time.  These include a drastic change in the understanding of history brought on by the finds of archaeologists and biologists, most especially the theory of human evolution and the epoch-making excavation of the ancient cities of the Near East; and the expansion of a post-industrial Western culture into every corner of the globe, with the attendant discovery and cataloguing of peoples living an "archaic" lifestyle.  In spite of the furor that the debate over evolution sparked, the public in general evinced a hunger to learn about both the remote past and contemporary "primitive" cultures as well (which for a long time were believed to be examples of societies which had persisted unchanged since the Stone Age).

At the same time, however, there were areas of the world which had not received the full attention of Western colonial and scientific scrutiny: it was not until 1912 that the Grand Canyon, for example, was finally mapped (not surprisingly, Lost Race writers had managed to populate this region before this with outposts of pre-Columbian Aztec urban society).  Thus, there were still unknown areas on this planet which could be easily populated with figments of one's imagination.  But by the end of the second World War, that had changed.  The entire globe had been mapped.  Well, maybe not entirely ... there are a few uncontacted peoples still out there (Papua, the Amazon), but satellite imaging tell us enough about the land on which they live to know that there are no cyclopean metropolis' of Phoenicians who still maintain an active cult of Baal in the Brazilian hinterland.

Perhaps even more than the mapping of the globe, however, a large-scale shift in Western society's perception of non-Westerners doomed the Lost Race romance.  In Lost Race Romances one can see not only the Western fascination with the exotic "other", but also the revulsion and sense of superiority toward the subjects of its colonial conquests.  Many Lost Race novels are brutally racist, so much so that it might be difficult to imagine how any but the most hardened and obsessed collector (such as myself) can even read one to the end, let alone find some kind of literary enjoyment in it.  These works are also generally misogynistic: the drastic change in the status of women that occurred subsequent to the industrial revolution is reflected in the highly conflicted portrayal of women in Lost Race fiction.  But in a world that has come to accept women in the workplace and in which the atrocities of Western imperialism are widely condemned, much of the zeitgeist which makes Lost Race and Lost World fiction relevant and exciting no longer exists.  As has been widely pointed out, it has been supplanted (albeit gradually, with much overlap in time) by interplanetary science fiction.

But to judge by the ongoing, if now limited, popularity of some of the aforementioned writers, especially Haggard, there does remain an audience for the Lost Race romances of yesteryear whose interest is not purely academic.  While I cannot speak concerning the specific opinions of individuals whom I don't know (and I sincerely hope that such individuals find this blog and feel called to leave comments!), what cotinually draws me back to Lost Race and Lost World romances is a sense of the wonder and mystery inherent in the world in which I live.  This sensibility was awakened in me at a very tender age, when I first began to read picture books about prehistoric life, Greek mythology, and civilizations of the past.  Lost Race and Lost World romances imagine a world where the possibility of the child of the modern age can visit and directly experience the worlds of the epochs in the distant past.  Unlike interplanetary science-fiction, which is almost entirely futuristic in its technological imaginings, Lost Race and Lost World romances quite obviously locate the imaginative state in the past; or, more accurately, construct a conceptual bridge between the contemporary world and the distant past in an escapist  mode, a link between who we are and the places from which we came.  Fortunately, in this day and age of speed and technology, there are still a handful of individuals like myself who doggedly persist in their antiquarian interests, and are still willing to retain the knowledge and the memory of the once-great genre of the Lost Race/Lost World romance.