The Three Impostors; or, The Transmutations

First published in the height of the “yellow nineties” and in the shadow of the Oscar Wilde trials, Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895) remains a relatively obscure text even as Machen receives increasing attention for his contributions to supernatural horror, the weird, and even science fiction. Situating this generically uncertain, richly multi-layered text in transnational traditions of the short-story cycle, the print culture of the 1890s, and the colonial scientific and material cultures of the fin de siècle, this edition shows that Machen’s long-neglected text has a strong claim to our renewed attention today. An extensive selection of accompanying historical documents includes contemporary reviews, related literary “inter-texts,” and documents and images related to the book’s publication history, design, and relationship to contemporary print culture.