"A Question of Spiritual Atmosphere": The Mystical Semiotics of G. K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades

Abstract: G. K. Chesterton's The Club of Queer Trades (1905) is often dismissed as a youthful work that lacks coherence. This essay argues that the six short stories in the collection explore a theory of communication. Chesterton develops a semiotics that not only reflects his larger epistemological concerns about our perception of reality and form, but one that informs his later fiction and anticipates key challenges in twentieth-century semiotic theory and its application (from Ferdinand de Saussure and J. L. Austin to Fredric Jameson).