An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

Concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Issue no 51 : March 2010

oscholars@gmail.com

We have chosen as this issue’s frontispiece the plaque unveiled by Gyles Brandreth on the Langham Hotel, 19th March 2010.

EDITORIAL PAGE

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

Since November 2007 this page has been split into two sections. SECTION I contains our Editorial, short pieces that we hope will interest readers, and innovations. SECTION II is a Guide or site-map to what will be found on other pages of THE OSCHOLARS with explanatory notes and links to those pages (formerly to be found on the Editorial page). Each section is prefaced by a Table of Contents with hyper links to the Contents themselves.
For Section I, please read on.

For Section II, please click

Clicking takes you to a Table of Contents;
clicking takes you to the hub page for our website, with links to all our journals and webpages;
clicking takes you to the home page of THE OSCHOLARS .
The sunflower navigates to other pages.

THE OSCHOLARS is composed in Bookman Old Style, chiefly 10 point. You can adjust the size by using the text size command (or zoom) in the View menu of your browser, Internet Explorer being recommended; or on the taskbar. We do not usually publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form.

TABLE OF CONTENTS I : ITEMS ON THIS PAGE
I. NEWS from the Editor	7. Neo-Victorianism and Steampunk	IX. OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE / WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE
II. In the LIBRARY	8. Oscar Wilde and Richard Haldane	X. THE POETIC LEGACY
III. NEWS, NOTES & QUERIES	9. Oscar Wilde and William Morris	XI. WEB FOOT NOTES
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray	IV. ON THE CURRICULUM: TEACHING AND RESEARCHING WILDE, THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE, ÆSTHETICISM AND DECADENCE	XII. OGRAPHIES
2. A Wilde Exhibition in Paris	V. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	XIII. MAD, SCARLET MUSIC
3. On Dandyism To-day	VI. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH	XIV. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES
4. The Wit and the Epigram	VII. LETTERS FROM OUR EDITORS	XV. COLOUR SUPPLEMENT
5. The 1890s Online	VIII. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS	XVI. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS
6. A Swinburne exhibition		XVII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS II : GUIDE TO ALL PAGES
Click for the Guide itself, or GO to reach the pages directly
A Giant’s Garden		Guidance for submissions		Reading Groups		Tables of Contents
Awards		The Latchkey		The Reception of Wilde in Europe		Teleny Revisited
Being Talking About		Library		Rue des Beaux Arts		Upstage
Bibliographies		Mad, Scarlet Music		Shavings		Visions
Conferences, Lectures		May I Say Nothing?		The Sibyl		Wilde Societies
Editorial, News & Notes [previous issue]		Moorings		Society News		Appendices
Editorial Team		Publications		Some Sell & Others Buy
The Eighth Lamp		The Rack and The Press		Special Issues
Going Wilde		Ravenna		Strange Webs

Nothing in THE OSCHOLARS © is copyright to the Journal save its name (although it may be to individual contributors) unless indicated by ©, and the usual etiquette of attribution will doubtless be observed. Please feel free to download it, re-format it, print it, store it electronically whole or in part, copy and paste parts of it, and (of course) forward it to colleagues.

As usual, names emboldened in the text are those of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS, who may be contacted through oscholars@gmail.com. Text in blue can be clicked for navigation.

NEWS FROM THE EDITOR

An Oscar Wilde Centenary

The weekend of 18th/19th July 2009 marked the centenary of the transfer of Wilde’s remains from Bagneux cemetery to Père Lachaise. The Société Oscar Wilde en France arranged appropriate commemoration, and an illustrated report appears here. We also publish ‘To Oscar’, an address given at the tomb by the niece of the present Marquess of Queensberry, Caroline de Bendern.

In 1909 Robbie Ross printed a leaflet to mark the moment, and Mr Merlin Holland has very kindly made available to us a scan of this in .pdf. This has been posted in our LIBRARY.

The weather was benign, and the crowd large. Music and dramatic readings were provided by the Compagnie de Oghma; flowers were laid by a number of Societies and by the Mayor of Berneval.

The opportunity was also taken to place flowers on the grave of Stuart Merrill, Oscar’s friend, who is buried opposite.

Caroline de Bendern

Innovations

Our editorial team has seen a number of losses, as professional or personal circumstances changed. We have, sadly, lost Costanza Vettori, Linda Wong, Tiffany Perala and Pilvi Rajmaë. Professor Wong has been succeeded as Editor for China by Dr Amy Lee and Tamara Poniatowska has joined the VISIONS team as Auction House Editor.

The Soul of Man under Socialism

This spring will see the publication of the fourth of our Special Issues, on Oscar Wilde’s socialism, edited by Anna Vaninskaya. This is the first anthology devoted to Wilde’s engagement with socialism and anarchism. As with our other Special Issues, new essays will be welcome for later publication, so this is both an announcement and a Call for Papers.

New content appears on our website nearly every day, and we announce this and other matters on our ‘yahoo’ subsidiary. The number of our readers who have joined this has been growing, and it is increasingly our medium for making announcements in the place of mass mailings, which more and more fall foul of anti-spam traps either at the sending or receiving end. We do urge readers to sign up to this group. The ‘yahoo’ forum can be reached via its icon.

THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

From time to time, we invite readers and others who have published articles on Wilde in anthologies or journals that are only readily accessible in university libraries (and not always then) to republish them (amended if desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website. We also republish older articles on Wilde from anthologies and festchriften, made obsolete by the march of scholarship, but which may still have some value in charting how he was viewed by earlier writers.

In September 2007, we began a year-long project of putting such articles on line at the rate of one a week, and were very happy with the response. This systematic project has now come to an end, but we continue to put articles up on an ad hoc basis. These appear in our section called LIBRARY, which now contains the largest collection of essays on Wilde so far assembled. Click its logo for access.

This will bring you to a Table of Contents, arranged thematically, from which you can link to each article. A subsection, IN OTHER BOOKCASES, is similarly arranged but gives links to articles that appear elsewhere on the internet.

We also link to French language articles similarly republished in Rue des beaux- arts.

These articles are copyright to their authors, and thus the usual rules for citation and against further publication apply.

New postings are announced on our discussion forum

FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED AND WELL-INFORMED: NEWS, NOTES, QUERIES.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dublin: One City One Book is a month long celebration each April of a book connected to Dublin either by content or author. The 2010 choice is The Picture of Dorian Gray. For the programme see www.dublinonecityonebook.ie.

A Wilde Exhibition in Paris

Patrick Chambon’s exhibition ‘Oscar Tapi’ opens at the Galerie Plume, 48 rue de Montmorency, on 20th March and runs until 15th May 2010.

On Dandyism To-day

An exhibition at The Galician Center for Contemporary Art, Santiago de Compostela, 17 December 2009 – February 2010.

The current condition of image proposals and the construction of subjectivity by means of appearance are essential themes of the early 21st century. Co-produced by the Centro Huarte, the exhibition aims to reveal the concepts and strategies inherited from Dandyism found in the work and the attitudes of contemporary artists, as well as the perdurance of the iconography and themes from Dandyist literature.

The Wit and the Epigram

Maurice Baring, who continues to teeter on the edge of greater recognition, was well esteemed as a man of wit himself. He was also a noted anthologist, and the following comes from his Have you Anything to Declare? A Note Book with Commentaries. London: William Heinemann n.d. p.256.

Elle ne parlait que par nuances; jamais elle n’a dit un bon mot: c’était quelque chose de trop exprimé. Les bons mots se retiennent ; elle ne voulait que plaire et perdre ce qu’elle disait.

Talleyrand on his Mother, from Talleyrand by Jacques Sindral.

Talleyrand’s mother as here described must have possessed the quintessence and the rarest form of true wit: that wit which is forgotten as soon as it is born, because it is so exquisitely appropriate to its context, to the time and place at which it is said, and to all the circumstances which give it birth, that it cannot be torn from them; and it is here that it differs from epigram. Epigram is remembered for a time, but if it is merely brilliant without being profound, it soon has an appearance of tarnished tinsel. Boswell once said: ‘When I complained of having dined at a splendid table without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy to be remembered, he (Dr Johnson) said, “There is seldom such conversation.”’ Whenever Oscar Wilde’s comedies are revived in modern times, the epigrams in them have mostly an air of faded tinsel, but the wit that is inherent in the situations, and which is in fact comedy in action, survives.

The 1890s Online

The 1890s Online is designed to facilitate the scholarly study of fin-de-siècle culture, based at Ryerson University. The archive focuses on visual/verbal/aural relations in a decade significant for its developments in print — book design, typography, illustration, photography, periodicals, newspapers, posters, playbills and advertising — as well as for its developments in the performance arts — music hall, theatre, and the emerging technologies of cinema. In its ideally envisioned form, The 1890s Online will include the tools for complex searches and comparisons of the period's images and texts as well as searchable audio links to its songs, sounds, and speeches. The archive is overseen by an international editorial board of scholars with expertise in the literature, art, and culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Essays cover Aubrey Beardsley, Ella D'Arcy, Marion Hepworth Dixon, George Egerton, Kenneth Grahame, Carl Hentschel, George Moore, Joseph Swan and ‘Other people of the 1890s will populate this section over time.’ Click here to learn more.

We wrote in March 2009 that the site seems to be have been stationary for some time, and this is still true in March 2010.

An Oscar Wilde Collection

The Dalhousie University Oscar Wilde Collection has greatly enhanced library holdings of turn-of-the-century literature. Strong holdings of first and limited editions of Wilde's work are present. Only five of Wilde's first editions are not included. Of those missing, there are four known copies of one title, and only two of another. Later editions, biographies, critical studies, as well as first editions of contemporaries associated with Wilde–Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Douglas, Frank Harris–are well represented.

Highlights of the collection include the first edition of Poems (1892), an autographed first edition of <The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), signed editions of An Ideal Husband (1899) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1899), first editions of the popular fables The Happy Prince (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), and a first edition of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). The beautifully illustrated 1904 edition of The Harlot's House, the controversial edition of Salome (1894) (illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley), and a complete run of The Yellow Book (1894-1897), the journal closely associated with Wilde, illustrate his "doctrine of aestheticism."

A Swinburne exhibition

"A Swinburne Gallimaufry–Selections from the John S. Mayfield Papers" in the Special Collections Research Center, Georgetown University, November 2009 to January 2010. A pdf of the exhibit brochure is available at http://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/swinburne-gallimaufry-selections-john-s-mayfield-papers.

Mayfield's collection is an extraordinary one, and was supplemented in one or two instances here by Mark Samuels Lasner, who loaned what must be a holy relic among holy relics–Swinburne's napkin ring.

Neo-Victorianism and Steampunk

Lisa Hager writes

Neo-Victorianism generally describes an approach to contemporary design that looks to the Victorian period for its inspiration and aesthetics. This interest in nineteenth-century culture has most recently come to fore in the form of steampunk. This increasingly popular literary genre and cultural movement looks back to the nineteenth-century’s Industrial Revolution, i.e. steam engines, and punk, i.e. play, often with great irony, with its conventions, inventions, and obsessions.

The central theme of steampunk and neo-Victorianism in general is a consideration of a “What if?” question that posits a strong connection and blending of the Victorian with current literature, design, and culture. In the case of steampunk, that question is directed at the technology of the nineteenth century. As its name suggests, steampunk is marked by its use of nineteenth-century steam technology in particular, often with a modern advancement that makes possible a device only theorized in the Victorian period.

Questioning the nineteenth century since the 1980s, neo-Victorianism and steampunk have been growing sub-genres of science fiction, in books like Tim Powers’ 1983 The Anubis Gates, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 The Difference Engine, the novels of Sarah Waters, A.S. Bayatt’s Possession (1990), and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, published from 1995-2000. However, neo-Victorianism and steampunk are much more than literary genres. They have become cultural phenomena, showing up in almost all areas of high art and popular culture. Television series such as The Wild, Wild West (1965-1969) and Sanctuary (currently airing on Sci-Fi) and anime films like the 2004 Steamboy (Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) as well as the Hollywood film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1998) are all very much neo-Victorian and steampunk cultural artifacts.

Not only do these genres have a clear presence in mass-market entertainment, but they also lay claim to a thriving grassroots engineering and production culture that produces steampunked versions of many modern conveniences, especially computers and weapons, as well as very vibrant Costume Play (CosPlay) and Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention (Con) culture. Indeed, one can even find a neo-Victorian island in the virtual world in the form of Second Life’s Caledon Island.

I have created a Google Group to facilitate scholarly exchange amongst those interested in the field. If you would like to join the email list, simply send me (lisa.hager@uwc.edu) an email with your name and the email address that you would like to subscribe under in the body of your email. Please feel free to forward this message to other folks who might be interested.

Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin – Waukesha, 1500 North University Drive, Waukesha, WI 53188-2720 Office: 129 Westview lisa.hager@uwc.edu || http://www.lisahager.net/

Lisa Hager is an Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS.

Oscar Wilde and Richard Haldane

One of the hardships Wilde had to undergo in prison was a visit from the politician-philosopher Richard Haldane, apparently at the instigation of the Ranee of Sarawak, a friend of the Wildes. Haldane was nicknamed ‘Schopenhauer’ by his political chief, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and it seems appropriate enough that Wilde should be visited by some one personifying the great German pessimist and misanthrope (‘A misanthrope I can understand’, says Miss Prism, who teaches German).

I used to meet him in the days of his social success, and, although I had not known him well, was haunted by the idea of what this highly sensitive man was probably suffering under ordinary prison treatment. I went to Holloway gaol, where I knew he was, and asked the Governor to let me see him. The Chaplain called in, and he said I was glad he had come, for with Wilde he had wholly failed to make any way. I then saw Wilde himself, alone in a cell. I put my hand on his prison-dress-clad shoulder and said that I used to know him and that I had come to say something about himself. He had not fully used his great literary gift, and the reason was that he had lived a life of pleasure and had not made any great subject his own. Now misfortune might prove a blessing for his career, for he had got a great subject. I would try to get for him books and pen and ink, and in eighteen months he would be free to produce’. He burst into tears, and promised to make the attempt. For the books he asked eagerly, saying that they would only give him The Pilgrim’s Progress, and that this did not satisfy him. He asked for Flaubert’s works. But I said that the dedication by that author to his advocate, who had successfully defended Flaubert from a change of indecent publication, made such a book as Madame Bovary unlikely to be sanctioned. He laughed and became cheerful. We hit on St Augustine’s Works and on Mommsen’s History of Rome. These I got for him, and they accompanied him from prison to prison. I afterwards visited him at Wandsworth Prison, and persuaded the Home Secretary to transfer him to Reading Gaol. I saw Lady Cowper, and with her aid his wife and children were looked after. On his release there came to me anonymously a volume, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It was the redemption of his promise to me.

Richard Burdon Haldane: An Autobiography. London: Hodder & Stoughton 1929 pp.166-7.

‘For a man to be both a genius and a Scotsman,’ reflected Wilde in after years, ‘is the very stage for tragedy’. Is there an echo of the rather heavy-going Richard Burdon Haldane in the radical M.P. Sir Thomas Burdon in The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Stephen Koss gives a shorter and slightly different account. ‘Haldane was a man of infinite kindnesses. […] It was Haldane who was first to visit Oscar Wilde in Holloway, bringing him pen, ink and something more diverting to read than The Pilgrim’s Progress.’ Stephen Koss: Lord Haldane, Scapegoat for Liberalism. New York and London: Columbia University Press 1969 p.11.

Lord Ashby and Mary Anderson, in what is admittedly a more narrowly based study of Haldane, do not mention Wilde at all. Eric Ashby & Mary Anderson: Portrait of Haldane at Work on Education. London: Macmillan 1974.

Oscar Wilde and William Morris : An Uncollected* Letter.

Anna Vaninskaya has drawn our attention to this passage in Elizabeth Miller's ‘William Morris, Print Culture, and the Politics of Æstheticism’, Modernism/Modernity 15.3 (2008) p.485.

‘Wilde’s interest in Morris’s theories and in the Commonweal is evidenced by his 1887 note, held in the Socialist League Archive:

“Please send Mr. Morris’s tract on ‘Socialism and Art’ to Mr. Oscar Wilde, 16 Tite Street, Chelsea. Also the ‘Commonweal’ for the year beginning with the November no.” Letter from Oscar Wilde, 29th October 1887, Socialist League Archive, International Institute for Social History, Folder 3230.

* Not in Holland & Hart-Davis.

on the Curriculum : Teaching Wilde, Æstheticism and Decadence.

We are always anxious to publicise the teaching of Wilde at both second and third level, and welcome news of Wilde on curricula. Similarly, news of the other subjects on whom we are publishing (Whistler, Shaw, Ruskin, George Moore and Vernon Lee) is also welcome. Andrew Eastham is developing a study of the teaching of Wilde, which we hope will be helpful to others who have Wilde on their courses. Andrew Eastham presented his introductory declaration in our July/August 2008 issue . To participate in this, contact THE OSCHOLARS at oscholars@gmail.com or Andrew Eastham at @.

Below is Dr Eastham’s first essay on the subject.

THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

This issue’s review section contains reviews by Philip E. Smith on Thomas Wright on Oscar’s Books; Pascal Aquien on Philip E. Smith on teaching Wilde; Leonée Ormond on Puppetcraft’s The Selfish Giant ; Julia Steck and Andrea Uebelhard on The Importance of being Earnest; Richard Pine on Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray; James Bryce on Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray; Elizabeth Carolyn Miller on Shaw; Ruth Livesey on Leela Gandhi on fin-de-siècle radicalism; Paul Fox on Decadent Poetry.

These can be seen by clicking

Last issue’s review section contained reviews by Tiffany Perala on The Importance of being Earnest in Portland, Annabel Rutherford on Rhonda Garelick on Loïe Fuller, Pilvi Rajamäe on Kate Macdonald on John Buchan, Luca Caddia on Daniel Novak on Victorian Photography & Fiction, Phillippa Bennett on Tom Pinckney on William Morris, Ruth Kinna on H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight on anarchism, Richard Nate on David Stack on Socialism and Darwinism.

These can be seen by clicking .

Clicking will take you to Tables of Contents for all our reviews, which we update in June and December. We welcome offers to review from readers.

OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH

There still does not seem to be a release date for Al Pacino’s long-awaited Salomaybe. Al Pahaps? The cast is as follows: Al Pacino, Serdar Kalsin (himself/Herod), Kevin Anderson (himself/Jokanaan), Jessica Chastain, Estelle Parson (Salomé), Roxanne Hart (Herodias), Philipp Rhys (the young Syrian), Jack Huston (Lord Alfred), Richard Cox (Robert Ross)…

A second Wilde film in the making is A Woman of No Importance directed by Bruce Beresford, with Sienna Miller, Sean Bean, Annette Bening.

Christian Merlhiot has directed a meditation on Oscar Wilde’s trial, due for release in Paris in April. For stills from the film and a specially written statement by M. Merlhiot, click here.

Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray, with Ben Barnes (Dorian), Colin Firth (Lord Harry), Rebecca Hall (Sibyl Vane), Ben Chaplin and Rachel Hurd, has failed to gain sympathy.

Posters

This month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin. After appearing here, these are posted on their own page, called POSTERWALL, gradually building up a gallery that will make the images more accessible than by searching the Internet. It can be found by clicking the icon.

Video of the month

A full version of Salomé, in English (U.S.), can be found on Youtube. Filmed at a performance by (perhaps) students, it comes complete with the audience’s coughing and a Prophet called Joe Cannan.

LETTERS FROM OUR EDITORS

LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND

Sharon Bickle

My aim in taking on the ‘Letter from Australia and New Zealand’ is to give Oscholars an insight into the excellent research being carried out in the southern hemisphere on Oscar Wilde and broader fin de siècle studies. This first Letter represents more of an introduction and a commitment to build a resource that will bring together information on relevant projects than an accurate snapshot of the work currently being done across literary, visual and dramatic disciplines throughout Australia and New Zealand. Thus, this first Letter begins with an apology–I have pulled together only a frugal offering–accounted for, I believe, by the overtasked nature of academia and the need to prioritize time which leads to requests for information–such as mine–going unremarked, rather than any prevailing lack of interest in Wilde and his world.

Where the Wilde Things Were: Performance

Many Australians are proud of their Irish ancestry, and Wilde’s plays–and plays about Wilde and his works–feature frequently on playbills about the country. In 2009, these included:

An Ideal Husband (dir. Timothy Wallace)

Starlight Theatre Co., Centre Stage Theatre (Brisbane)

Dates: 5th-21st February 2009

Reviewer Jason Whittaker writes: “More bodices than a BBC drama, more bitching and back-stabbing than a Liberal Party lunch; more manners than a Sunday lunch at grandma's, more pouting than a lemon-eating contest” (Retrieved 1st September 2009 from http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/brisbane/an-ideal-husband–starlight-theatre-company-2222.html).

Lady Windermere's Fan (dir. Nicholas Papademetriou),

Darlinghurst Theatre (Sydney)

Dates: 12th March to 11th April.

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Third Year Production (dir. Kevin Jackson)

NIDA, Parade Theatre (Sydney)

Dates: 31st March to 4th April.

Wilde About Joyce

State Library of Victoria (Melbourne)

Date: 16th June.

Bloom’s day in 2009 saw a surprising eclipse of the man of the hour by Wilde. The State Library of Victoria offered a program that included an original theatre piece, Wilde about Joyce, a seminar on Joyce and Wilde, and a ‘Dinner with Wilde’ (including readings from Wilde’s plays) at the Celtic Club.

Wilde: About Town

Brisbane boasts a restaurant called Wilde’s, which nonetheless serves modern Australian cuisine. The restaurant is decorated with lively quotes–although how Wilde would have addressed a Moreton Bay Bug is anyone’s guess.

Australian television features a quiz program called, The Einstein Factor, based on the well-worn formula in which contestants nominate an area of expertise to be quizzed on. You can access the questions related to “The Life and Times of Oscar Wilde” at http://www.abc.net.au/einsteinfactor/txt/s2570583.htm

Fin de siècle Research in Australia and New Zealand

The primary society for information on nineteenth-century studies in Australia and New Zealand is the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA). AVSA holds an annual conference, often in February, and also supports a scholarly, refereed journal. Information on AVSA and AVSJ can be found at http://www.avsa.unimelb.edu.au/index.htm

This year’s AVSA conference was hosted by the University of Otago (Dunedin, NZ), and was devoted to the theme “The Victorian Sensorium.” Prof. Sally Ledger was to have given the keynote address on “The Nineteenth-Century Man of Feeling” addressing new work that has been tragically cut short by her sudden death. Of particular interest to those interested in fin de siècle culture were keynotes on Late-Victorian Scottish Fiction (McIllvanney), Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady and its introduction of the ‘first detective heroine’ (Johnson) and Charles Lee Lewes (Harris). In addition there were a wealth of papers devoted to New Women, canonical and popular late-Victorian writers, Sensationalism, and the relationships between sensory experience and Aestheticism. These included the ‘Radical Sensitivities of Marion Bernstein,’ Scottish poet and supporter of women’s rights (Cohen and Fleming); the construction of the adventuress in the late Victorian imaginary (Coleman); ‘Sarah Bernhardt’s Success in Victorian England’ (Pauk); ‘Sensational Decadence: Two late Victorian novels by Francis Adams’ (Tasker); ‘Walter Pater’ (Burgess); ‘the interplay of immateriality and tangibility in late-Victorian James (Davidson); ‘Victorian Xenophobia and Dracula’ (McLean); ‘Synaesthesia and Aestheticism’ in Yeats, Swinburne, and Wilde (Harley), and the launch of Wendy Parkins’s new book, Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s (Palgrave Macmillan). The 2010 AVSA conference will be held in Singapore between June 25-27.

Also of interest, Professor Pamela Gerrish Nunn of the University of Canterbury (NZ) presented a keynote address on ‘Alienation, Adoption or Adaptation? Aestheticist Painting by Women’ at the British Aestheticisms Conference at Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier on 3rd October (www.esthetismes.org).

In terms of postgraduate work being carried out in this area: PhD candidate, Molly Duggins of Sydney University, is currently working on a thesis titled 'Nature, Industry, and Craft: The Album in Late-19th-Century Visual culture’ based on the 'South Pacific Fern Album,' a luxurious printed gift book published in Melbourne, c. 1889. In this thesis, she examines the aestheticisation of nature in album imagery and its colonial undertones, the exhibitionary nature of the album both in form and content, and the intersection of and tension between industry and craft as visually manifested in the album in the last two decades of the 19th century. Agnieszka Zabicka (U. of Auckland) is currently working on a thesis titled 'Towards a Feminist Aesthetic: The Fiction of Mona Caird.' Carla Molloy recently completed a thesis on 'The Art of Popular Fiction: Gender, Authorship and Aesthetics in the Writing of Ouida' (U. of Canterbury).

The forthcoming edition of the Journal of Preraphaelite Studies will include a review of Jason Edwards’s book, Alfred Gilbert’s Aestheticism (Ashgate 2006) by Australian visual arts scholar, Juliet Peers.

Finally, on a personal note, my research into the fin de siècle collaborative partnership of Michael Field will find a new home from January 2010 when I take up a postdoctoral fellowship position at the University of Queensland. The fellowship project will take a hybrid approach, combining a much needed biography of the lives of Bradley, Cooper and Field with an examination of the intersections between authorship, celebrity, and consumerism in late-nineteenth century British society. Central to this project will be the production and consumption of celebrity authorship and the similarities between Wilde’s manipulation of his popular image as Poet and Bradley and Cooper’s creation of their own Poet.

Acknowledgement: I would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Joanne Wilkes, President of AVSA, in compiling information for this letter. I welcome emails from Australian/NZ scholars informing me of research currently underway, forthcoming or recently published for the next letter (sharon.bickle@gmail.com).

LETTER FROM GERMANY

Lucia Krämer

19 January 2010

Dear David

A happy new year to you and all readers of THE OSCHOLARS! I’m afraid I haven’t written in quite a while. I had originally intended to send you a letter reporting on all things Wildean in Germany at the end of the last theatrical season, which seemed like a perfect moment to take stock. I had to find, however, that not only were there no really relevant new productions of Wilde or the other authors that form the main concern of THE OSCHOLARS between my last letter in April and the end of the theatrical season in Germany in July/August, but, more importantly, the book market did not yield much of interest either. I therefore decided to wait until the end of the year 2009 in order to take stock and can now present you and all interested readers with a full and meaty letter from Germany. As usual, I will subdivide my information according to medium and provide a mixture of data and explanation/ contextualisation.

Books/Audiobooks

Unsurprisingly, Wilde was yet again the most prominent of the British/Irish fin-de-siècle authors on the German book market in the past eight months. Although a lot of the secondary literature on Wilde produced in Germany is about his dramatic work, and despite his relatively stable presence in German theatres, Wilde’s plays were, as usual, horribly under-represented among his texts on the German book market – there hasn’t been a new publication in ages. Wilde’s reputation as a writer among the general reading public in Germany therefore relies almost exclusively on his narrative work (which is complemented by collections of aphorisms). Resulting from the fact that all the early German translations of The Picture of Dorian Gray are now out of copyright, an increasing number of re-prints is available. The only noteworthy new edition of the text in the past nine months, however, was the 12th edition of the Lachmann/Landauer translation by the publishers Insel. Apart from this, the autumn brought three new editions of old translations of Wilde’s fairy tales, namely a paperback version of all of Wilde’s fairy-tales and a hardback version of The Happy Prince and Other Tales for Insel, as well as a new hardback edition by the publisher Diederichs. The Canterville Ghost also had a strong presence, with a new bi-lingual edition by the publishers Nikol, a new paperback edition in German by Klett and a new audiobook version by Jumbo Neue Medien, who also released a German audiobook version of The Selfish Giant read by renowned actress Katharina Thalbach. A children’s musical by Christine Ebert based on “The Selfish Giant” was moreover released on CD by the publishers Sven-Michael Bluhm.

The publishing houses Grin and VDM continue bringing out seminar papers and theses by students, some of which also relate to Wilde and his period, such as

Nerea Vöing, Der ‘fruchtlose’ Narziss in der Literatur – die Ablehnung von Generativität. [The ‘Barren’ Narcissus in Literature – The Rejection of Generativity]. Munich: Grin, 2009. 78 pgs.

Berit Bethke, Die Geburt der Hysterie am Vorabend des Fin de siècle: Eine kulturhistorische Betrachtung. [The Birth of Hysteria at the Eve of the Fin de siècle: A Historio-Cultural Analysis]. Munich: Grin, 2009. 60 pgs.

Nina Hrkalovic, Künstlerische Selbstrepräsentation: Inszenierungsstrategien an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert. [Artististc Self-Representation: Strategies of mise-en-scène at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century]. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2009. 136 pgs. [about strategies of self-representation by Wilde, Pound, Eliot and V. Woolf]

From the field of German Studies comes a student textbook about German literature around 1900, which does, however, also engage with the background of the development of the various types of literature at the time in a more general way and therefore is not only interesting for students of German culture:

Philip Ajouri, Literatur um 1900: Naturalismus, Fin de Siècle, Expressionismus. [Literature around 1900 : Naturalism, Fin de siècle, Expressionism]. Berlin : Akdademie Verlag, 2009. 253 pgs.

The most interesting new publications in German concerning Wilde were two books relating to his early German reception. The first of these titles is a re-publication by the Kessinger Publication Company of Franz Blei’s seminal text In Memoriam Oscar Wilde, which was the first extensive treatment of Wilde in German when it first appeared in 1905 and is now again available. The second text is a thesis on possible influences of Baudelaire and Wilde in the writings of Viennese journalist Karl Kraus, who was among the first to write about Wilde in the German language press.

Cristiano Bianchi, Karl Kraus als Leser von Charles Baudelaire und Oscar Wilde. [Karl Kraus as a Reader of Baudelaire and Wilde]. Innsbruck, Vienna and Munich: Studien Verlag, 2009. 116 pgs.

Apart from Wilde, also Shaw made an appearance in the German language book market in the autum of 2009, when the German version of one of Shaw’s public discussions with Chesterton from 1928 was re-printed. The book also contains eight newspaper essays by Chesterton:

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Sind wir uns einig? Ein Streitgespräch mit Bernard Shaw nebst einigen Essays. [Do we agree? A Debate between G.K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw; with several essays]. Coesfeld: Elsinor, 2009.

Moreover, Stevenson, like Wilde, has developed into a very stable presence on the German book market, as was evidenced in the past nine months by a number of new editions of old German versions of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as well as an English-language edition of An Inland Voyage, which was, however, published under the title Small Boat Journey on the French Canals (1904) by the publishing house Salzwasser. The renowned publishing house Piper has moreover published a new edition of Fanny Stevenson’s diary:

Roslyn Jolly, ed. Kurs auf die Südsee: Das Tagebuch der Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. Trans. Ilse Rothfuss. München: Piper, 2009.

Theatre

I wrote in my introduction that the summer brought no important new productions of Wilde, at least in Germany. Wilde continued his career as a writer who is predominantly associated with light entertainment in new productions of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Badische Landesbühne in Bruchsal, and of an adaptation for children of The Canterville Ghost at the Landesbühne Sachsen-Anhalt in Eisleben. Both productions were still being played at the end of 2009. Apart from that, Earnest was produced for a limited number of open-air performances at the Neues Theater in Halle.

Things changed when the new theatrical season began and brought with it a quite remarkable number of Wilde performances. Among them were amateur productions, such as a version of An Ideal Husband by the Volksspielbühne Thalia, a Hamburg amateur theatre, which premiered on 29 October 2009 and ran for four performances. Further amateur productions included a version of Earnest by the Theater aus Schöneiche, and by the private Theater unterm Dach in Lobberich (prem. 13. Nov 2009). Individual English-language performances of Earnest and of a drama version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in Lübeck and Goch respectively were also on offer. The predominance of Earnest among Wilde’s plays on German stages was once again evident, not least because the very successful Augsburg production of the play, which had premiered in October 2008 was continued in the new season. Moreover, a new production of the Jelinek version of Bunbury was put on in Hamburg by one of Germany’s young directing talents, Anna Bergmann.

The one production of Wilde in the past nine months that made the biggest splash, however, was a new An Ideal Husband at the 3Raum-Anatomietheater in Vienna, directed by Hubsi Kramar. Not a German production in the narrow sense, therefore, but it was put on at a leading stage of the German speaking theatre world and therefore has to be at least mentioned here.

While the production of Salome at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, which was abandoned last year due to artistic differences, seems to have slipped from the schedule altogether, a new production of the play, which was, after all, the starting point of Wilde’s fame in Germany, premiered in Stuttgart in October. There seems to be a tendency to see this particular play of Wilde’s nowadays almost exclusively through the lens of Strauss’s ubiquitous opera, which is why any production of the original play deserves particular interest, especially if it tries to be original like the production at the Kammertheater Stuttgart by Ulrich Rasche. Rasche set the play on an almost empty black stage made up of hardly more than light and shadows, with the actors in danger of fading and disappearing into their black environment. They had to walk on a floor made of styrofoam boards which constantly threatened to crack under them, making them balance their steps like on thin ice, and it seemed as if they were in constant danger of breaking through the floor and disappearing. In keeping with this approach, Anja Stübinger as Salome delivered her lines with dry indifference, exposing the role of the figure of Salome as a Leerstelle. The dance of the seven veils was accordingly replaced by a quick unbuttoning of Salome’s blouse (by herself) that allowed only the slightest glimpse of her breast. The refusal to play out the climax and probably best-known element of the story underlines the necessity of the spectators’ engagement and of their agency in filling the gaps of Wilde’s play, albeit in the light of how its best-known aspects are commonly perceived (see e.g. Salome’s status as a femme fatale).

Salome

Kammertheater Stuttgart, in a version by Ulrich Rasche and Frederik Zeugke

First night 8th October 2009

Direction Ulrich Rasche
Set Ulrich Rasche
Costumes Bernd Skodzig
Music/Life-Looping Stefan Tiedje
Dramaturgue Frederik Zeugke

Cast:

Herodes Elmar Roloff

Herodias Anja Brünglinghaus

Salome Nadja Stübiger

Jochanaan Zvonimir Ankovic

and Boris Burgstaller, Rainer Philippi, Tom Wlaschiha

An unusual treatement of the dance of the seven veils was also one hallmark of the new production of Strauss’s opera Salome theat premiered at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Duisburg on 8 Nov 2009. This interpretation of the opera by director Tatjana Gürbaca (which later travelled to Düsseldorf and will be playing again in April 2010), seems to have been a victim of the German Regietheater and like the Stuttgart production of the play garnered predominantly negative reviews. Christoph Schulte criticised on www.opernnetz.de, for example, that the production remained opaque for the spectators unless they studied the programme extensively or heard one of the introductory talks to the production at the opera house. The overall design was to expose the hidden depths lurking beneath the apparently smooth surface of normal family life. The dance of the seven veils therefore appeared like a charade in which Salome represents the history of her family which tells of victimisation, abuse and the role of money in interpersonal relations. The piece ends with Salome running amuck and causing a blood bath, killing everyone on stage including herself. Only an innocuous servant, probably Salome’s confidante and accomplice, survives the massacre.

SALOME
Deutsche Oper am Rhein

Musical Direction: Christian Badea
Directed by Tatjana Gürbaca
Stage and Lighting by Klaus Grünberg
Costumes by Silke Willrett
Dramaturgue: Anne do Paço

Herodes: Udo Holdorf
Herodias: Renée Morloc
Salome: Nicola Beller Carbone
Jochanaan: Markus Marquardt
Narraboth: Jussi Myllys
Page: Katarzyna Kuncio
Orchester Düsseldorfer Symphoniker

Besides Wilde, the most prevalent authors from the fin de siècle on German stages were once again Ibsen and Hauptmann. Apart from them I think I should mention that more and more plays based on works by Thomas Mann are being produced on German stages, with three productions of a drama version of Buddenbrooks produced in Regensburg (prem. 29 Jan 2010), Freiburg (prem. 10 Oct 2009) and Celle (prem. 11 Sept 2009). These productions continued the widespread fascination with Mann resulting from the German TV production Die Manns (2001), which had already led to a (critically maligned) German Buddenbrooks heritage film released at Christmas 2008.

Conference

To end, let me come to something (almost) completely different. Even though the focus in my letters is usually on Wilde, I usually also write about books and theatre productions concerning the literature and culture at the turn of the nineteenth century that are not primarily associated with symbolist and decadent traits. I therefore should mention a conference on the topic of Der Kaiser und die Künste [The Emperor and the Arts], which took place in Düsseldorf from 3-5 December 2009. The conference tried to shine a light at various arts in Wilhelmine Germany albeit with a rather heavy focus on historicism. The papers delivered at the conference engaged with the reception of the antiquity and the middle ages in Germany during the reign of Wilhelm II and then went on to inform about how culture politics at the time affected museums, architectural projects and other fields of the ‘public’ arts while also investigating the personal taste of Wilhelm II, e.g. in music, and his relationship to various arts. The conference seems to have provided an interesting look at the arts in Germany during the Wilhelmine period.

Well, this is it for this time. As usual, I hope that you and the readers of THE OSCHOLARS will find something interesting and useful in my letter.

All the best,

Lucia

LETTER FROM Italy

Rita Severi

Two items from 2009

On January 26, 2009, at 9 p.m., the third channel of the Italian radio (RadioRai 3), especially dedicated to cultural events, aired the broadcast of Wilde’s De Profundis, interpreted by the actor Paolo Bonacelli, according to the new translation by Masolino D’Amico. The reading, directed by Riccardo Massai, was introduced by Antonio Audino and discussed by the translator and Paolo Orlandelli. Paolo Bonacelli proposed this expressive and successful reading again at the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, on Saturday and Sunday, 11-12 July, 2009, in San Nicolò and on July 26, at 9 p.m. at the Certosa di San Giacomo, in Capri.

On Thursday, August 6 2009, in the splendid setting of the Renaissance centre of Carpi (about 15 km from Modena), Italy, the performing artist, Carlo Sabbadini, staged his one-man parody of Wilde’s Salomé with the title, Treading Ironically on Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (Camminata ironica su Salomé di Oscar Wilde). The actor dressed like a character from one of Beckett’s plays, literally strutting all the time on a bare stage, delivered the speeches, that he had adapted and translated from Wilde’s French into the local dialect (carpigiano). The whole play was up-dated to ridicule the present political situation in Italy. For instance, Herod was a caricature of Berlusconi whose lascivious womanizing induces him to lust over the Lolita-like Salomé, while Herodias encourages her daughter and John the Baptist expresses his opposition by yelling invectives. Sabbadini interprets all these roles simultaneously, moving and gesticulating and talking with different voices and different intonations with the ability of the mature, versatile, “nonsensical” showman.

LETTER FROM SCOTLAND

Emily Alder

September 2009

Greetings to the OSCHOLARS from a mild and sunny Edinburgh September! This is an improvement on the rainy August, which nonetheless did little to dampen the sparkle of Wilde dramatisations in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Performances included Lady Windermere’s Fan by amateur dramatics society the Chelsfield Players, Rocket Theatre’s Oscar Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Keith Drinkel’s one-man performance of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

As well as direct adaptations and new productions, the characteristic Fringe range of comic twists and cameo appearances of literary figures sallied forth in Vice Versa’s gender-swapping The Importance of Being Earnestina, and Poet’s Corner by Tea for Ten Theatre Company: in Westminster Abbey, Wilde, Byron, and other celebrated wordsmiths “congregate and wile away the centuries, awaiting the next party”. Reviewed positively, both shows had a successful run; Oscar Wilde and the Men of the Hour, however, drew poor reviews, and it’s possible to see why from the group’s own Fringe programme description: “History's most fearsome and celebrated authors join forces to travel time and bring smite to the schemes of the diabolical Time Nazis”. Case rests!

Other fin-de-siècle shows included no fewer than two versions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper: The Yellow Wallpaper from new theatre company Ethereal Pants, and ShadyJane’s Her Yellow Wallpaper. Both female leads drew particular commendation from reviewers. At the other end of the spectrum appeared Robin Johnson’s Broken Holmes, “an excellent Holmes pastiche, well-written and performed, and worthy to be remembered as one of the better attempts to capture this literary giant”.

Festival season over, more regular theatricals resume, albeit taking a break from Wilde. Dundee Rep’s production of The Cherry Orchard has just finished a three-week run; ‘a production,’ writes The Guardian, ‘that chimes with our own recessionary times in which the formerly well-off are the least equipped to contemplate the future.’

In July, the 33rd annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures at the University of Glasgow featured an array of papers on Wilde, especially engaging with his international circulation: “The Japanese Reception of Oscar Wilde: Comedy and Tragedy”, from Maho Hidaka of Seisen University, Japan; “A ‘First-Rate Theatrical Fashion Article’: Trading Wilde in the Fin-de-Siècle Viennese Literary Marketplace” by Sandra Mayer, University of Vienna, Austria; and “Contemporary Chinese Rereadings of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince”, by our own Linda Wong, Hong Kong Baptist University.

W. B. Yeats also figured on the programme in “The Hybrid Late Masks of W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Kostes Palamas (1859-1943): A Comparative Approach”, from Konstantina Georganta, University of Glasgow. The full abstracts are also available.

I also draw the OSCHOLARS’ attention to two events, which sadly I was unable to attend: in mid-October, Professor Andrew Murphy of the University of St. Andrews gave his inaugural lecture: The Poet and the Professor: W.B. Yeats, Edward Dowden and the Meanings of Culture. Finally, if not in Scotland, then at least on a Scottish writer, A Wormwood Afternoon in Carlton-in-Coverdale, North Yorkshire, featured a talk by Paul M. Chapman on "The Decadent Dr Doyle" on 10 October, “an exploration of the often overlooked Nineties elements in Conan Doyle's work”.

I look forward to reporting again.

Yours, as always,

Emily

23 September 2009

BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS

Here we now only note Calls for Papers or articles specifically relating to Wilde or his immediate circles. The more general list has its own page, updated every month; to reach it, please click . We hope these Calls will attract Wildëans.

Ireland, Modernism and the fin de siècle : Symposium

16th–17th April 2010, Mary Immaculate College Limerick

Plenary speakers:

Prof. Lyn Pykett, University of Aberystwyth ; Prof. Adrian Frazier, NUI Galway

Ø FOR ABSTRACTS OF THE PAPERS, CLICK HERE

Theatre of Oscar Wilde

The Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes (http://www.sfeve.paris4.sorbonne.fr/) has invited contributions for issue number 72 (October 2010) of its journal Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (http://www.cervec.org/) devoted to the Theatre of Oscar Wilde, edited by Marianne Drugeon, @. The Call for Papers is closed. More information will be published by us when we have it.

OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE / WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE

One of the more unlikely readers of Wilde : in the film Tyson (2008, dir. James Toback), the boxer Mike Tyson recites from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’.

Lady Windermere’s Fan Dance ?

We take this take this interesting addition to reception theory from the review by Frances Wilson of Noralee Frankel: Stripping Gypsy, The Life of Gypsy Rose Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009 (TLS 2nd October 2009 p.34).

‘ “When I lower my gown a faction”, she purred in her famous set-piece, “A Stripteaser’s Education”, “I am not interested in your reaction … I am thinking of some painting by Van Gogh or Susanne [sic] or the charm I had in reading Lady Windermere’s Fan”.

Alcohol taken in sufficient quantities (5):

In De Profundis, Wilde refers to Dagonet 1880 as Bosie’s favourite champagne. This would appear to be Lucien Dagonet et Fils, a Boursault vineyard so obscure that our Paris caviste, who specialises in champagnes, had never heard of it. An internet search has yielded an address, and we will pursue the subject.

Sitting room ?

Oscar Wilde's ‘The Selfish Giant’ in the form of an armchair by artist Hannah Chapman.

Hannah Chapman ‘The selfish giant’. Recycled armchair. Upholstered felt, 100% cotton

Ms Chapman sends us the following:

Hello, my name is Hannah Chapman. I am a UK illustrator who recently graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, London. I am currently living and working as a Textile Designer in Hong Kong.

I am interested in image and function. I like to play with what is and what could be. I use illustration to create communicative images, objects, furnishings and environments.

During the final year of my degree I was commissioned to redesign and re-brand ‘No.10 The Sandwich Shop’. It was during this time I developed a strong interest in functional illustration; considering and translating the needs and communicative aspects of an object or space.

The ‘Selfish giant chair’ came from a sudden love for reading all things Oscar Wilde.

‘Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. 'I have many beautiful flowers,' he said; 'but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.'

After spending a summer working and learning at a traditional upholsters in my hometown my mind began to run away with what I could create. I began to sketch ideas down and ended up with the idea of creating the selfish giant as he is in the story, bound to his armchair. Unfortunately due to a sudden move from London to Hong Kong this piece is yet to be finished.

I hope to create and show the piece as a functional installation. I feel it is important for the work to be shown in a social environment, café, library etc… A place where the piece can act as part of the furniture but like the book it originally derived from, have a communicative usability. Surrounded by hung images illustrating the rest of the story I hope to show and share this piece in the near future.

OSCAR WILDE: THE poetic legacy

Those who have followed our pieces on ‘The Ballad of William Bloat’ will welcome this biographical note on its author, kindly written for us by his son.

The Origins of The Ballad of William Bloat.

Peter Calvert.

Raymond Calvert was born on 30th October 1906 at Banchory House, Helen's Bay, Co Down, where he died on 11th July 1959. His father, William Henderson Calvert, was a Belfast stockbroker, and his mother, Barbara Calvert formerly Williamson, was the eldest daughter of the Rev. Dr. Henry McIlree Williamson of Fisherwick. He went to Bangor Grammar School and, at the age of 16, to Queen's University, Belfast, where he studied English Literature. While there he wrote a number of short stories but his main interest was in drama, an interest which began as a boy when he had met members of the original Ulster Theatre. At Queen's therefore he was a keen member of the Dramatic Society. It was the custom on the last night of a production to have a cast supper at which each member of the cast would make a contribution. It was for this occasion in 1926 that he composed and first recited The Ballad of William Bloat.

He was lucky to survive his final year in college, having had major health problems and a serious motorcycle accident, and was only 20 when he graduated in 1927. In fact he was hardly recovered when he was off to Dublin to gain experience in the theatre, working both at the Abbey Theatre and with Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLíammóir at the Gate. 1928 found him in Cambridge at the Festival Theatre (forerunner of the Cambridge Arts Theatre). But with the onset of the Great Depression he was drafted into the family stockbroking firm, where he worked for the rest of his life, and in 1934 he married.

Of course he continued to write, often in the middle of the night. In 1936 took his MA degree at Queen's by a thesis entitled ‘The natural history of sculptural forms’ which was regarded as of exceptional merit. During and after the War he wrote at least three radio plays, two of which, ‘On the cliff’ (inspired by the cliffs of Islandmagee) and ‘I don't pretend to....’ (drawing on his father's interest in spiritualism), were broadcast in the late 1940s. In the 1950s he gave a number of radio talks on Belfast life; one on Smithfield Market was much appreciated by those who worked there. He was slightly surprised but quite pleased at the continuing popularity of Bloat, and made sure I was told that it was to be broadcast in the early 1950s as a recitation in The McCooeys - the local BBC equivalent of The Archers.

In 1950 the poem first appeared in print in an anthology entitled Brave Crack! An Anthology of Ulster Wit and Humour (Belfast, H.R. Carter Publications). This is the only version approved by my father for publication in his lifetime, though he was not too pleased that the words ‘bloody’ and ‘hell’ were then regarded as too risqué to be spelt out in full. (This, the original version, was however used by Joe McPartland, ed., in The Ulster Reciter: Ballads, Poems and Recitations for Every Occasion, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 1984, and on this occasion I am glad to say that readers' feelings were not spared.)

After my father died in 1959, the copyright had passed to my mother, who continued to receive from time to time contracts for the use of Bloat from the BBC. As time passed however it became painfully clear that other people were beginning to forget who wrote it. A surprising number seem to have believed that it was a traditional ballad, and this came to a head when it was published without attribution in 1978 by Oxford University Press in The New Oxford Book of Light Verse edited by Kingsley Amis. Amis, we were told, refused to accept the fact of its authorship, and though the Press did accept it, rather reluctantly, it was only to receive credit in a prospective second edition, by which time the harm was already done. By contrast, when I wrote on behalf of my mother to the Walt Disney Corporation about its use without acknowledgement in ‘Dead Poets' Society’ (1989), the result was a personal telephone call from the Vice President with an immediate offer of a settlement which she accepted.

With the arrival of the internet it became clear that a second, and more serious, problem was the almost automatic way in which the text was becoming distorted to fit the political prejudices of which the original had been a spoof. The problem was the punchline; ‘For the razor blade was German made/ But the sheet was Irish linen’ It is not ‘Belfast’ linen; linen made in Belfast has always been known as Irish linen; indeed there was at one stage, I believe, a proposal from the Irish linen industry to use Bloat in their advertising - perhaps not altogether a good idea. The razor blade was not ‘Dublin’ made; either, but ‘German’ made, which reflected the standard prejudices of the time, as well as the fact that my father often chose to shave with the then already old-fashioned 'cut-throat' razor. However in the new age of European co-operation in the 1980s, which we both strongly supported, my mother preferred ‘foreign’ made, and that is the variant she approved for The Ballad of William Bloat a poem by Raymond Calvert illustrated by Hector McDonnell (Belfast, The Blackstaff Press, 1982). As she herself said, the point of the antithesis was, after all, between Irishness and foreignness though I like to think of it as being between the strength of the soft fabric and the weakness of cold steel.

© Peter Calvert 2009

v For the authentic version of ‘The Ballad of William Bloat’ by Raymond Calvert, click here.

Aamer Inayatullah, a Pakistani poet and painter, has studied art and the liberal arts in Pakistan, USA, Italy and France. A figurative painter for many years, he is currently based in Paris, where he has turned to figurative sculpture. An art critic, he has also written poetry in several languages. He says, ‘First love, then look’. Mr Inayatullah is interested in writing critical responses to poetry, notably that of Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Yeats) that themselves take poetic form, and are intended to be read with the originals. We feel this to be an interesting critical reaction (making no judgment on the poems as poems) and publish these as an original contribution to Wilde studies. Discussion can take place in our forum.

Aamer Inayatullah writes:

I would like to propose a certain kind of poetry, which would be an appreciation, criticism, creative reinterpretation etc of a poem. Most criticism of poetry has been written in prose, and it would be interesting if this were done in poetry. There is of course a wide spectrum of how modern poets respond to earlier work, and the diversity of responses is something to celebrate. In art Mannerism was somewhat akin to my idea, although it is not an exact example. However although some of the Mannerists were somewhat tedious, like Julio Romano, others like Parmaginino attained soaring heights of ‘affected beauty’. In more modern times Cubism would not be imaginable without Cezanne, and Mark Rothko said ‘I am coming straight out of Rembrandt’

Thus if this kind of Poetry is written, it would in some ways as Walter Pater said be ‘The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping through ten thousand experiences.’ Needless to say, I do not propose that this is how all modern poetry should be, but this could be one kind of poetry. As a suggestion it may be called Post Alfred Douglas(PAD) poetry, honouring the Carrara marble-like chiseled quality of his sonnets, or as Mannerism (although this word historically and even today, has somewhat negative connotations), and so on.

I have made some modest efforts in this respect. For me it was the spontanæous response to the sentiment the original poem expressed, or reinterpretation, and sometimes taking the story forward in a different but related context. For example in ‘Les Tuileries Jardins’, I imagined an imaginary meeting of Oscar and his children during the former’s exile. My sonnets are a liberal interpretation of the sonnet form, the context being they are written in post-modern 2008.

I would be happy know the comments and criticism of the readers to my idea, and to my sonnets.

a) Sonnet to Oscar’s ‘Endymion’

Oh! Apple trees are hung with bees
And silver leaves are fluttering free
Arcadian flowers bloom up to my crimson knees
I told a dove to find my love
And tell someone waits for thee with crimson lips covered with bees

Dots all over turtle dove, he stops to find his pretty love
The grey wolf rushes round and round
Oh! Lunatic he looks around
An autumn wind cools blooded cheeks
Even the daffodil must close his beak( bill)
No more dancing on the hill(hills)

Oh! Misty veil doth beauty hail
And Endymion’s lips look pretty, pale.

b) Sonnet to Oscar’s ‘Les Tuileries Jardins’

When winter air is cold to bear
And playing bear is winter sun
When Tuileries trees are pretty bare
A stranger looks for a chair

Two children run around my Tuileries goal
I look at them – its pretty drole
These hiding seeking playful fauns
They launch their ships as Triton’s swans (to Triton’s bronze)
They look as bits of gold to me
And sparkling silver are their knees
And rushing stopping here and there
They finally come to me who’s there

I embrace them in my shivering arms
And break into blossom all at once.

Web Foot Notes

A look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as elsewhere.

All the material that we had thus far published in the ‘Web Foot Notes’ was brought together in June 2003 in one list called ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’. A Table of Contents has been added for ease of access. ‘New websites continue to be reviewed here from time to time, after which they are filed on the Trafficking for Strange Webs page, which was last updated in May 2008: a new update will be completed this month. Trafficking for Strange Webs’ surveys 48 websites devoted to Oscar Wilde. The Société Oscar Wilde is also publishing on its webpages two lists (‘Liens’ and ‘Liaisons’) of recommendations, updated in December 2009 and in January 2010 respectively. To see ‘Liens’, click here. To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click .

OGRAPHIES

We continue to expand our sections of BIBLIOGRAPHIES, DISCOGRAPHIES and SCENOGRAPHIES and this is now a major component of our work. A FILMOGRAPHY is now being constructed. Click the appropriate icons. Updates are announced regularly on our forum.

Catulle Mendès

Noelle Benhamou is compiling a bibliography of sources on Catulle Mendès. Please contact her @

Mad, Scarlet Music

Our regular feature concerning Wilde-related music covers productions, recordings and reviews of the Wilde operas, cantatas, orchestral suites, musical comedies and ballets, to which we add information about other musical works of Wilde’s period or derived from its literature. From Strauss’ Salome and Zemlinsky’s Florentine Tragedy to Oliver Rudland’s The Nightingale and the Rose and Elizabeth Esris’ and Sergio Cervetti’s Elegy for a Prince, we gather all the materials for a major study of Wilde’s impact on composers. Mad, Scarlet Music is edited by Tine Englebert. For the current edition, click

NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

News of the Wilde Societies is published on their own page. We are very pleased that we now carry news of the Oscar Wilde Society of Japan. To reach the page, please click

THE OSCHOLARS COLOUR SUPPLEMENT

Readers of our sister journal RUE DES BEAUX ARTS will be familiar with its long running strip cartoon on Oscar Wilde by Patrick Chambon. In the issue of November 2008 this was joined by a new strip by Dan Pearce, translated into French (as Oscar Wilde: La Resurrection) by Danielle Guérin. With this issue of THE OSCHOLARS we publish the third episode in English (as Oscar Wilde: The Second Coming). Click the illustration to take up the tale:

Pictured: The original door of cell C.3.3, Reading Gaol, now part of the H.M. Prison Service Collection housed at the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham

Our plan is eventually to bring all three strips into one folder, where they can be read straight through as graphic novels.

For a Bibliography of Wilde in graphic novel form compiled by Danielle Guérin, click here.

OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS

All our journals appear on our website www.oscholars.com and can be reached from our hub page at that address. All of them invite submissions. Each has a mailing list for alerts to new issues or special announcements. To be included on the list for any or all of them, contact oscholars@gmail.com.

The Eighth Lamp

The second issue of this journal of Ruskin studies has been published on our website, under the vigorous editorship of Anuradha Chatterjee. THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day will shed much light in new places, and puts Ruskin studies firmly in conjugation with Wilde studies.

The Latchkey

The first two issues of THE LATCHKEY, a journal devoted to reporting and creating scholarship on The New Woman, were published in the spring and autumn of 2009, and a new edition will be ready this spring. The editor is Petra Dierkes-Thrun and the reviews editor is Jessica Cox. Co-editors are Sharon Bickle, Sophie Geoffroy, Lisa Hager, Christine Huguet, Claire O’Callaghan and Sarah Townley.

Melmoth

Edited by Sondeep Kandola, two issues of this journal of late Victorian Gothic appeared within THE OSCHOLARS main editorial section. The third issue floated free.

The Michaelian

This is the first journal to be dedicated to Michael Field, marking the growing interest in that remarkable couple and was published in the spring of 2009. The first issue was edited by Sharon Bickle, and the second will be edited by Michelle Lee, spring 2010.

Ravenna

This new journal, intended to appear twice a year, is devoted to the Italian fin-de-siècle and decadenza, with particular emphasis on the British connection. It is edited by Elisa Bizzotto and Luca Caddia, and the first numbers appeared in spring and autumn 2009. Articles are accepted in both English and Italian, in the latter case with an English précis.

Rue des Beaux Arts

The twenty-fifth issue of our French language journal under the dedicated editorship of Danielle Guérin was published in March 2010. It continues to reflect and encourage Wilde studies in France and the Francophone countries.

Shavings, Moorings and The Sibyl

New issues of these journals devoted to George Bernard Shaw, George Moore,, and Vernon Lee (edited by Sophie Geoffroy) are published as material is accumulated. We recommend joining their mailing list for alerts.

Visions and Nocturne

In the spring of 2008 we gathered together all the visual arts information that was scattered through different section of THE OSCHOLARS into a new journal called VISIONS. This was consolidated in the summer, and a new edition was published in the autumn followed by further issues in spring and summer 2009. A new issue was published in January 2010. VISIONS is co-edited by Anne Anderson, Isa Bickman, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld, Tamara Poniatowska, Charlotte Ribeyrol and Sarah Turner. NOCTURNE, our journal devoted to Whistler and his circle, is now being incorporated into VISIONS.

Acknowledgments

THE OSCHOLARS website continues to be provided and constructed by Steven Halliwell of The Rivendale Press, a publishing house with a special interest in the fin-de-siècle. Mr Halliwell joins Dr John Phelps of Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Mr Patrick O’Sullivan of the Irish Diaspora Net as one of the godfathers without whom THE OSCHOLARS could not have appeared on the web in any useful form.

Return to Table of Contents | Return to hub page | Return to THE OSCHOLARS home page

Andrew Eastham

Teaching Aestheticism at M.A. level

‘Aestheticism and Decadence in Victorian Culture’

Teaching Aestheticism at BA level comes with its frustrations. Dorian Gray might appear on the Victorian core course, but will we really have time to give students the necessary intellectual backgrounds for the ideas that Lord Henry is pedaling so artfully and Basil Hallward is living by so earnestly? How will we account for the transformation of Pater’s Hellenism into fin-de-siècle Decadence if students are little aware of the key intellectual currents of C19? Aside from the difficulty of giving a real sense of Pater beyond the ‘hard gem like flame’, it’s near to impossible to give any meaningful sense of Schiller and Hegel, Gautier and Baudelaire, Ruskin and Morris, and Whistler and Wilde in a lecture. And how will we attend to critical and literary works which invariably establish new relationship between literature, painting, music and philosophy without exposing students to all these forms? Part of the challenge in teaching Aestheticism is that many of its most important texts are more theoretically charged than they at first seem. Many readers fail to see beyond the ornamented parataxis of ‘The School of Giorgione’ to appreciate its complexity as a statement about the relations between artistic media. At the same time we need to be careful about overburdening a movement which promoted sensuous play and intellectual freedom with dogmatic theoretical or historical contexts.

Ideally, there will be space for considering intellectual and historical contexts alongside close reading that allows more than a week per text. In British higher education, this is often impossible. But I’m going to begin this thread with an account of a teaching experience which allowed an unusually broad space for a proper study of Aestheticism, its background and legacies. This was an MA course I taught at Royal Holloway, London, which gave me the opportunity of setting a syllabus on Aestheticism over two semesters. I took over what was previously a team taught course structured in 4 parts; an initial block focusing on Ruskin, Pater and Morris, a second block on ‘Aesthetic Poetry’, from Tennyson and Swinburne to Michael Field, a third section dedicated to Wilde, and a fourth section focusing on the New Woman, Aestheticism and Decadence. I redesigned the course so that the first semester provided a historical survey of British Aestheticism, beginning with Ruskin and ending in Wilde, with a strong emphasis on Pater and Wilde. Readers of the Oscholars might find this Wildean telos satisfying, but the second semester complicated and in many ways refuted such a narrative. Already harping on haunted portraits, we went forward to James’s Wings of a Dove, and this gothic representation of feminine isolation and aesthetic autonomy sent us back to Rossetti’s ‘A Portrait’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’, then further back to Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, where the gender trouble at the origins of Aestheticism was revealed. Following Gautier’s exquisite romance on performativity, artifice and sexual panic, we gave proper space to Baudelaire’s poetry, the necessary path to understanding British decadence, as well as the ekphrastic and synaesthetic projects of writers from Swinburne to Arthur Symons and Michael Field. The final phase of this course covered the New Woman in Aestheticism, and the return of the Gothic, with specific reference to Vernon Lee. The aim was to finish with a recognition of the continuing presence of Aestheticism in the Contemporary. First, in aesthetic theory, we would look at Jaques Rancière’s brilliant recapitulations of the project of aesthetic idealism, one of the rare examples of continental aesthetic thinking that recognizes the example of the British Aesthetic Movement. Finally, we would read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty – one of a series of texts in the last decade to analyze or revive the idea of beauty, in this case through a subtle and provocative use of the Victorian fin de siècle. Alas, even in a full year’s teaching, breadth had to give way to focus: Rancière and Hollinghurst were dropped, but ultimately we managed to cover a satisfying range of Victorian material. I’m going to describe in detail the challenges I experienced in presenting this material and a sense of what I believe are useful focuses for class discussion.

Semester One

Ruskin and the ideal of Gothic

‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from Stones of Venice)

2. Ruskin and Baudelaire: Beauty and Modernity

Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life (I-IV, VIII-XI)

Ruskin, extracts from Modern Painters II (Section One, Chapters 2,5,12: Section Two, Chapter 2), and Fors Clavigera (Letter 52: ‘Vale of Lune’)

3. Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

‘Preface, ‘Winckelmann’, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, ‘The Poetry of Michaelangelo’, ‘Conclusion’

And ‘Diapheneitè’ (from Miscellaneous Studies, or in Appendix to The Renaissance, OUP)

4. Pater: Aesthetic Subjectivity and the ‘Giorgionesque’

‘The School of Giorgione’ (from The Renaissance)

‘A Prince of Court Painters’

‘The Child in the House’ (handouts)

5. Morris and Utopian Æstheticism

Morris, ‘The Aims of Art’, ‘Useful Work versus Useless Labour’

Pater, ‘Aesthetic Poetry’ (handouts)

6. Reading Week

7. Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Criticism

‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ (in The Soul of Man under Socialism, and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Dowling)

8. Wilde: Dandyism

The Picture of Dorian Grey (Penguin)

9. Wilde: Symbolism

‘The Critic as Artist’, Salome

10. Wilde: Socialism

The Soul of Man Under Socialism

11. Wilde: Social Comedies

The Importance of Being Earnest

Aestheticism and Decadence: Semester 2

1. Henry James and the legacy of Æstheticism

James, The Wings of a Dove

2. Aesthetic Poetry 1

Tennyson, ‘The Palace of Art’, ‘The Lady of Shallot’,

Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’

3. Aesthetic Poetry 2

D.G. Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, ‘The Portrait’, Sonnets from ‘The House of Life’

(esp. ‘Soul’s Beauty’, ‘Body’s Beauty’), ‘Found (For a Picture)’, ‘On a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione’

C. Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’

4. Decadence 1: Gender Trouble and the Origins of Aestheticism

Gautier, Madamoiselle du Maupin

5. Decadence 2: Aesthetic Vampirism

Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

Hegel, extract from Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (‘The Irony')

6. Reading Week

7. Victorian Image / Music / Text

Michael Field, Sight and Sound

Whistler, Symphony in White No.2, Nocturnes

Swinburne, ‘Before the Mirror’, Mallarmé, ‘Autre Eventail’

Huysmans, extracts from Against Nature (chapter 5)

8. Decadence 3: Theatricality and London

Arthur Symons, London Nights , ‘At the Alhambra’, ‘The World as Ballet’, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, ‘London: A Book of Aspects’

9. The New Woman’s Aesthetic Lives

Vernon Lee, ‘Lady Tal’, George Egerton, ‘A Cross Line’, Victoria Cross, ‘Theodora: A Fragment’, Kate Chopin, ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ (in Daughters of Decadence)

Amy Levy, ‘A London Plane Tree and Other Verse’

10. The Gothic and the Uncanny

Vernon Lee, Hauntings

11. Post-modernism, Neo-Victorianism, and the End of Aestheticism

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

First Semester

Section One: British Æstheticism

Even at MA level the majority of students had only encountered Aestheticism according to its ‘greatest hits’ – namely Dorian Gray and Pater’s ‘Conclusion’. So the literary and cultural history needed establishing. At the same time I wanted to establish some sense of the tradition of aesthetics that Pater was working. As such, my introduction covered the key theoretical sources of Aestheticism.

Necessarily curtailed, I began with Kant’s idea of beauty as an end-in-itself , Schiller’s promotion of the play drive and the ‘aesthetic state’, and his vision of the Juno Ludovisi as an image of absolute freedom – a figure which would haunt the late Victorian period, reconfigured by Pater as the vampire Mona Lisa. I went on to explain a divide which I believe is fundamental to late C18 and C19 aesthetic thinking – on one side the German Romantic ironists, with their belief in literature, criticism and the fragment as the basis of a sublime freedom; on the other side, Hegel, whose evolutionary system of aesthetics was directed against the Romantic ironists. In Hegel’s system, the end point is poetic drama, and in this sense he was both following Schiller and pre-empting a number of later C19 thinkers, including Guiseppe Mazzini and Wilde himself, in which drama was both the highest point of aesthetic evolution and the expression of the social organism. Establishing this divide makes it easier to clarify how arguments about specific artistic media were often linked to the political dimensions of Victorian Aesthetic thinking. It also sets up a tension between organicism and individualism which was crucial to the increasing divide between Ruskin and Pater.

These different contexts were transmitted to British Aestheticism via Oxford Hellenism and French Decadence. For a brief narrative of transmission, Gautier is an obvious starting point. We would be covering Mademoiselle du Maupin later in the course, so this was a point to mention the famous preface, with its assertion that ‘nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need.’ It was particularly important to establish this before working on Ruskin, since the divide between Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism would already be clear. The introductory lecture covered Wilde’s donning of Gautier’s red waistcoat and its revolutionary implications, before briefly tracing Gautier’s viral transmission into British culture through Swinburne and Rossetti.

It would have been more contextually correct to give a proper introduction to Pre-Raphaelitism and the background to Ruskin at this stage, but there is rarely world enough and time to be satisfy the current rage for contextual correctness and cover all the theoretical background that interests me. So I choose to go straight into Ruskin with this alternative theoretical narrative in mind. Although German idealist aesthetics may have been anathema to Ruskin, students should immediately find both extreme contrasts and affinities – organicism, the ideal of play, and the earnest attempt to think about the systematic relationship between artistic media and the social function of art.

Ruskin’s Stones of Venice was the initial text, and I used the selection from ‘The Nature of Gothic’ in the Oxford Selected Writings. This is ample for a discussion of the key ideas; how Ruskin’s Gothic paves the way for a form of aesthetic individualism through the rejection of a system or ornamentation and the promotion of the grotesque; his critique of alienated labour and machinic production; his ideal of aesthetic education (‘to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit’); his labour theory of value; the central function of architecture in his social vision; and his organic idea of the relation between classes. Unsurprisingly, the discussion of Ruskin focused around the political tensions in his work, and at this point I introduced Linda Dowling’s analysis of the idea of aesthetic democracy in Victorian Aesthetic prose. (Along with Jonathan Freedman on James and Aestheticism, Regenia Gagnier on Wilde, and Kathy Psomiades on Victorian Poetry, this would be one of the critical texts I most frequently recommended). It was only after an argument about Ruskin’s politics had developed that I mentioned Ruskin’s grouchy self-identification as a ‘violent Tory of the old-school’, which was received as both a shock and a confirmation. In one sense, this set up Ruskin as a straw dog to contrast with liberal cosmopolitan Aestheticism, but there was an aspect of the Gothic that would recur throughout the course; one student picked up on the ‘restlessness’ that was intrinsic to the Gothic sensibility, and this word would be echoed in diverse texts by Pater, Gautier and Vernon Lee.

In the second week we maintained the focus on Ruskin briefly, using sections from Modern Painters II in order to frame a contrast with Baudelaire’s ideas about beauty and modernity. This is the most turgid of Ruskin’s prose: I set this piece because Ruskin’s ideas about aesthesis and theoria might provide an interesting contrast with Baudelaire’s aesthetic impressionism, but the selections understandably fell flat, and in future I will confine this part of Modern Painters to my introductory comments. I Introduced The Painting of Modern Life with a Power-point presentation called ‘Spectators of Modern Life’. This began with a contrast between Millais’ portrait of Ruskin and Carjat’s Baudelaire, with a discussion of their different relationships to realism and modernity, before moving on to introduce French impressionism and the conditions of spectatorship. I compared Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Mists’ with Caillebotte’s ‘Young Man at his Window’ to suggest the ways that the Romantic ideal of the sublime spectator had been domesticated and urbanized. We went on to look at balcony paintings by Caillebotte and Manet, theatrical interiors such as Renoir’s ‘La Loge’ and Cassatt’s ‘Woman in Black at the Opera’ and Degas’s ‘Woman with a Lorgnette’. This reflection on spectatorship culminated in a discussion of Manet’s ‘Olympia’ and ‘A Bar at the Follies Bergeres’, where I largely followed T.J.Clarke’s argument about Manet’s reflexive form. Finally we arrived at Baudelaire through Constantin Guys’ etchings, asking why Baudelaire choose these rough sketches of a journalistic illustrator as his model of modernity. Its important to establish the model of aesthetic subjectivity that British Aestheticism inherited from Baudelaire at this point, and looking at the sections on ‘Dandyism’ and ‘Woman’ we discussed the relationship between his aristocratic model of ironic detachment and the promotion of absolute artifice. Baudelaire’s curious combination of decadent misogyny and a Schillerian promotion of free semblance would be echoed throughout the course, particularly in texts by Gautier, Wilde and Symons.

Baudelaire’s focus on the subjectivity and evanescence of the aesthetic impression were a crucial link to Pater, and particularly to the ‘Preface’ and ‘Conclusion’ of The Renaissance. The focus in the first week on Pater was the contrast between the dark late-Romanticism of ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ and the Hegelian Hellenism of ‘Winckelmann’. I believe in d’Hangest’s assertion that Baudelaire and Hegel are the two most important intellectual contexts for an appreciation of Pater’s aesthetics, and I spent some time introducing Hegel’s Aesthetics as a background to ‘Winckelmann’. The details of Hegel’s system are not often taught, but permeate the work of Pater and Symonds, and consequently Wilde, as Smith and Helfand demonstrate in their edition of the Oxford Notebooks. The system has two crucial dimensions – an evolutionary historical narrative and a systematic theory of media. Gautier, Pater, Symonds and Wilde all follow the idea that art progressed from the Symbolic mode of Oriental art, where sensuous form is neglected for transcendental aspirations, to the Classical mode of Greek sculpture, where art found its highest moment of sensuous beauty. When I outlined Hegel’s narrative of the overcoming of the Classical in the Romantic mode I stressed its relevance to Decadent Aestheticism - Hegel narrates a fall into precisely the kind of subjectivism that Pater evokes in his account of Leonardo. One of the students pointed out, very astutely, that Hegel’s Romantic mode basically re-instated the problem of the Symbolic – once again, art experienced an estrangement between sensuous form and spirit. I found this perception a delightful surprise, since I expected Hegel’s dry system to fall on deaf ears; by now, the difference between BA and MA teaching was becoming very clear to me. In the discussion of ‘Leonardo’ we picked up on the resonances with Baudelaire’s flaneur, focusing on Pater’s miniature narrative, where Leonardo roams the streets of Florence ‘catching glimpses’ of uncommon beauty; ‘some infusion of the extremes of terror and beauty’. (I would note later that Wilde recycles this narrative subtly in his account of Dorian’s urban wanderings immediately after his Decadent conversion.) In this discussion one student was particularly fascinated by Pater’s construction of Leonardo’s development through a kind of aesthetic via negativa; ‘for the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’. This allowed us to focus on the model of bildung that emerges from Pater’s life-narratives. I focused the discussion around the inevitable ekphrasis of La Giaconda and asked what model of personal development this suggested. I had recently been writing about vampirism in Aestheticism, so I introduced my idea that the vampire is a model for condition of Romantic irony that was both promoted and suffered by the Aesthete– a simultaneously abject and exquisite condition of detachment. The students would eventually weary of my harping on vampires, but I would say that here that the recent film of Dorian missed a great opportunity to follow this contemporary obsession and introduce vampires into the story; such sensational ploys might have gone some ways to ameliorating its bizarre omission of much of Wilde’s brilliant dialogue.

The second week on Pater was focused around ‘The School of Giorgione’; my intention was to compare this with the evocative and often neglected imaginary portrait, ‘The Prince of Court Painters’, which is in many easy a melancholy meditation on the aesthetics of ‘The School of Giorgione’, but much of the seminar was taken up by a discussion of Pater’s theory of media. Initially I framed 1877 as a transitional moment in the history of Aestheticism; Pater’s essay was published in the same year as Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics, when the Grosvenor Gallery opened, and Whistler served his writ to Ruskin. I explained the links with Whistler and gave a power-point presentation outlining Whistler’s move towards musical abstraction, from ‘Symphony in White’ series to the ‘Nocturnes’. Maintaining this focus on the interface between music and painting, I then switched to the Renaissance and spent some time focusing on Pater’s primary contexts; Titian’s Concert and the Fête Champêtre. The Pitti Concert is a great painting to analyze in class and a good way in to Pater’s theory of media. I referred to Michael Fried’s well-worked dichotomy between theatricality and absorption to address the tension between Pater’s dramatic or performative reading of the painting and his emphasis on musical absorption. The experience of space in the painting is particularly important here, since Titian’s landscapes hint at the fact that music is the one art that invisibly fills the space we inhabit, whilst at the same time touching us with the force of the soundwave. I argued polemically that the condition of music as an invisible waveform makes it the most ideal of the arts, and this started a debate about the relative status of the various arts. The argument was quite heated at times and produced a diversity of assertive claims for different media – notably dance, drama and poetry. Finally, to question our received system of the arts, I asked what claims might be made for perfume (this does feature in ‘The School of Giorgione’ in an interest way). Could there be an olefactory art that might develop to the sophistication of music, if the appropriate technologies were available? Meant as a provocation, of course, this leads back to Physiological Aesthetics, and in future classes I might conduct a debate between Allen’s Darwinian theory of aesthetic evolution and Pater’s unapologetic insistence on the highest refinement of the aesthetic sense in modernity.

The final week of this section of the course focused the question of aesthetic modernity and its discontents through William Morris’s lectures during and after his conversion to Utopian Socialism. I set these alongside Pater’s review of Morris’s ‘The Earthly Paradise’ so as to examine the contrast between Pater’s spectral idea of aesthetic utopia and Morris’s dogmatic insistence on the overcoming of the autonomous arts. I must confess to a difficulty in teaching Morris here, since whilst I sympathise with his utopian socialism, I find great limits in his response to aesthetic modernity, by which I mean the separation of the artistic media, the emancipation of form from social or devotional context, and the detachment of the ‘aesthetic’ as a category of experience. This makes me a poor teacher of these works. Many of the students found the same limitations in Morris’s lectures, and one astutely articulated the way that Morris’s rejection of aesthetic autonomy effectively sacrifices the production of ‘art’ as we know it. In retrospect he would have been better served by an expert who could lecture on the relation between Morris’s decorative work and his socialism, and the development of Arts and Crafts. In future I will most likely abandon contextual accuracy and set Morris’s lectures alongside passages from Marx’s ‘1844 Manuscripts’ here. Granted they were not published till long after Morris’s death, but they give a much sharper intellectual focus to the idea of alienated labour. Marx’s vision of the estrangement of the sense and ‘species being’ would provide a powerful focus for the comparison between Ruskin, Morris and Pater, as well as providing a theoretical framework for thinking about Wilde’s Aesthetic Socialism.

Section Two: Wilde

Many of the important intellectual contexts for Wilde’s work were available to students after the first section of the course, and I began with works that carried the ideas of C19 Aestheticism in the most provocative forms. Rather than setting the aesthetic dialogues together I grouped ‘The Decay of Lying’ with ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’. I prefaced this by an introduction to Wilde’s earlier lectures and essays, with a focus on the way that he promoted drama as an ideal art form. The review of ‘Langtry as Hester Grazebrook’ is a useful short context here, since it shows how Wilde was using the discourse of Hegelian Hellenism – under the influence of Pater’s ‘Winckelmann’ and Symonds’s Studies in Greek Poetry – specifically to celebrate the art of acting. At the same time, we could say he is merely using the conventional motifs of journalistic flattery – the image of the actress as moving sculpture is both a key tenet of Hegel’s Aesthetics and a standard motif of C19 theatre criticism. ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ both state a more serious theory of drama as the ideal art, raising it from the dangers of contemporary realism, but they are also fraught with the difficulties of idealising an essentially mimetic medium. In teaching Wilde’s critical prose I choose to focus on the problems of mimesis – both in terms of artistic media and personal self-fashioning. I asked students to compare Wilde’s ideal personality – the actor Willie Hughes – with the ‘beautiful exotic woman’ whose tragic mimetic compulsion Vivian narrates in ‘The Decay of Lying’. The gendering of the mimetic personality is also worth discussing here, and can be revisited in the discussions of Dorian and Salome, as well as in later texts by Vernon Lee and George Egerton.

It is difficult to choose between the many ways of providing a theoretical context for these issues around mimesis and identity; there are numerous articles in late Victorian journalism concerned with the value of imitation in learning or the dangers of compulsive mimicry. By the fin de siècle Tarde and Le Bon had made mimesis the basis of sociology and mass psychology, and in Wilde’s own reading Herbert Spencer was a precursor to these theorists. In contemporary theory we could look to Girard’s work on mimetic desire or Derrida’s treatment of Platonism. I choose to promote Emerson as a crucial context for Wilde, following Isobel Murray’s emphasis on the Emersonian basis of Wilde’s vision of character. The key statement here is Emerson’s insistence in the essay on ‘Self Reliance’ to ‘Insist on yourself: Never Imitate’. For North American students, this seemed to be as familiar as a nursery rhyme, though less so to British graduates. It is particularly useful in highlighting some of the larger contradictions of Wilde’s Aesthetic individualism – how can such an artfully self-fashioned personality, borrowing freely from Nero, Gautier or the Regency as he pleases, who praises the essentially mimetic art of acting above all others, reject imitation with such vigour? These questions can equally inform a discussion of ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, where the paradoxical assertion of Anarchist individualism and Socialist collectivism might be interestingly addressed in terms of the mimetic or shared aspects of identity. Most of all they are relevant for a reading of ‘De Profundis’, where Wilde’s ideal personality is Christ (replacing Willie Hughes). In future I would teach ‘De Profundis’ here and use Jonathan Dollimore’s polemical rejection of Wilde’s later concept of character to frame a debate. Dollimore and others have suggested that ‘Decay’ is the ‘real’ Wilde in so far as it promotes artifice and irony against nature, whereas ‘De Profundis’ is a regressive move to a ‘depth model of identity’. But the Emersonian context rather complicates this dogmatic assertion, since ‘Self-Reliance’ is clearly as present in ‘Decay’ as in ‘De Profundis’. I am attaching a handout I used to focus a number of these issues around imitation, bildung, the ideal personality, and the politics of identity in Aestheticism, which also nods back to Pater’s concept of aesthetic self-development. (*link to file; ‘Aestheticism MA Individualism handout’)

It might be most interesting to stage these debates before a reading of Wilde’s fiction and drama, though in this case we discussed Dorian Gray immediately after the week on ‘Decay’ and ‘Mr W.H’. One of the questions I always ask about Dorian is - why didn’t Wilde centre his narrative from the perspective of Basil Halward, the tragic artist? Once students begin to think about the bildungsroman that Wilde didn’t write, many of the key issues about the novel come into focus – the difficulty in representing homosexual desire (which can now be more easily taught with reference to the Lippincott’s Dorian), what is at stake in the issue of artistic impersonality, and once again the crossing between artistic and personal imitation. I stressed those fascinating passages where Basil confesses to have found himself in Dorian, and subsequently faced a crisis around personal independence. This clearly suggests the Emersonian basis to Aesthetic Hellenism, whilst Henry’s reflections on Basil’s plight focus the Platonic background (usefully focused, if there were time, by Derrida’s essay ‘The Double Session’, which contains a good brief summary of Plato’s concept of mimesis). Dorian is the most accessible text to most students, so it is important to use this opportunity to focus the wider movements within the culture of Aestheticism – Basil’s crisis and death reflects the general shift from Aesthetic Hellenism to Decadence, and Dorian’s promotion of ceremonial form, insincerity and the artificial paradise clearly evoke a specifically 90’s formation of aesthetics and identity (these latter issues are interestingly focused by Alan Ackerman in his essay from Philip Smith’s recent collection on Approaches to the Teaching of Wilde, which I reviewed in the Oscholars).

Following Dorian, I chose to group together, somewhat perversely, Salome with ‘The Critic as Artist’. My rather strained rationale behind this was that I believe that ‘Critic’ moves away from the aesthetic of ‘Decay’ and ‘Mr W.H.’ (where the priority is dramatic embodiment) towards a Symbolist aesthetic, where drama is now subsumed within a subjective idea of literary impressionism. This proved to be too unwieldy and inaccurate a focus of comparison, but the tension between dramatic embodiment and Symbolism would emerge in the discussion of the Salome. This began with a look at the play’s shock strategies, such as the sudden changes of register between a hieratic Symbolist style and the demotic and visceral force of Salome’s entrance. Salome’s dialogue with Jokanaan was a key focus here, and the main interpretative question concerned her sudden reversals between spleen and idealism; was this a sign of hysterical violence or a subtle mimicry and reversal of the misogynist discourse of Jokanaan and the Symbolist discourse of Narraboth (as critics such as John-Paul Riquelme and Joseph Donohue have argued)? The answer to this question depends on how we see Salome’s agency and relation to power, and this lead to a discussion of Herod and the Roman state. I proposed Regenia Gagnier’s reading that Salome forces Herod into a crisis of sovereignty which he has no choice but to overcome. I suggested Foucault’s ideas about the function of disciplinary spectacle here (see in particular Discipline and Punish, Penguin 1991, p.48), since Salome stages a moment in which state power is apparently challenged by sensuous, aesthetic and erotic demands, only to be restored by a final act of state violence. The haunting relevance of this conclusion to the general fate of Wilde and Aestheticism has become increasingly clear to me, and it might be a powerful future strategy to move directly from Salome to a consideration of the trial. The structuring of this 5 week section on Wilde was not entirely successful –‘The Soul of Man’ would have been better grouped with the earlier essays, and an immediate transition from Salome to The Importance of Being Earnest would have had two benefits. First, it would have clarified the shock of Wilde’s move away from a hieratic form of poetic drama, and second, it would have carried the Foucauldian ideas about discipline and power into the discussion of Earnest.

The issue of how earnest should we make our discussion of Earnest is broached in Philip E. Smith’s collection: in this case pre-Christmas mince pies and wine challenged my attempts to orchestrate an earnest discussion of Wilde’s strategy of absolute artifice and irony. From an earnest perspective, Earnest might be seen as a betrayal of all the values of Aesthetic Hellenism and Emersonian Individualism, a depthless play with surface which reveals the arbitrariness of language and performative, but from the perspective of post-modern Wildeans, this is precisely its value. The questions I asked to focus these issues started with the ways that reality was constructed in the play; how are privacy and publicity configured (through the construction of double identities and the status of Cecily’s diary), and what, if anything, anchors reality so as to prevent absolute play? A number of students felt that Earnest offered a king of Schillerian synthesis of Aestheticism and post-modernism here, in the sense that they saw the depthless play of signifiers as a utopian sign, paradoxically consistent with the vision of ‘The Soul of Man’. This was perhaps a charming idea to carry towards the Christmas festivities, but as an alternative I proposed a negative version of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque; that Earnest allowed a free play of desire and identity within the limits of an authority figured in Lady Bracknell, whose amusing grotesquery revealed both the arbitrariness and the persistence of this authority. This is essentially to read Earnest according to the ‘festive’ idea of Shakespearean comedy. If sobriety had allowed this reading to be pursued more coherently, it might have been focused by a comparison with Gautier’s Mademoiselle du Maupin, where the festive form of As you Like It allows for the most exquisite play of masks and desires. But there would be time for this in the following semester, when Gautier would establish the path towards the Decadent masque, and Ruskin’s vision of Gothic Venice would be replaced by James’s vision of Milly Theale’s consumptive Venetian idyll. Wilde would haunt the next semester, and even when many of his ruses were revealed as clever pieces of mimicry, his unique performance of Aestheticism might still be read as a culminating moment of a long history, just as Dorian saw himself in the hall of his ancestral portraits.