Issue no 51 : March 2010

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PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

«Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?»

For the Table of Contents, click   | To hub page | To THE OSCHOLARS home page

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Books and Articles on Oscar Wilde
The Bigger Picture
Other Publications of Fin-De-Siècle Interest
The French Connection
Miscellanæous

INTRODUCTION

We hope where appropriate to review at least some of the books listed here. As always, we are happy to hear from anybody who would like to review; and we are always willing to consider for publication abstracts or précis of journal articles or published or unpublished doctoral theses.

For tables of all reviews published, click

As usual, names of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS are printed in bold. We will pass on any inquiries.

Books in French are covered more fully in our sister publication Rue des beaux Arts, the bimestrial bulletin of the French branch of the Société Oscar Wilde en France, which can be accessed via our hub page. This does not preclude reviews in THE OSCHOLARS.

Until recently, we also included here a survey of Journals. The reconstruction of our website suggested a new free-standing page, and the survey is to be found monthly as ‘The Rack & the Press’, edited by B.J. Robinson (University of North Georgia). Similarly, notices about publications on the visual arts will now be found in our journal Visions, reached by clicking its icon.

A list of recommended bookshops appears in our section ‘Some Sell and Others Buy‘. If ordering, please mention THE OSCHOLARS as this helps ensure a flow of information. We also refer readers to the journal Year’s Work in English Studies. The current issue is Volume 88, Number 1, 2009.

Oscar Wilde displayed in Eason’s Bookshop, O’ Connell Street, Dublin.
Photograph courtesy of Jim Yates, whose Oh! Pere Lachaise is displayed full face.

OSCAR WILDE

Stefano Evangelista (ed.): The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe. London: Continuum. Series: The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe. Publication date: 20th June 2010 ISBN: 9781847060051480 Pages, hardcover £150 / $295.00

This is a comprehensive volume of international research on the European reception of Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is now widely recognised not only as one of the most representative figures of the British fin de siècle, but as one of the most influential Anglophone authors of the nineteenth century. In Britain Wilde suffered a long period of comparative neglect following the scandal of his conviction for ‘gross indecency’ in 1895; and it is only recently that his works have been reassessed. But while Wilde was subjected to silence in Britain, he became a European phenomenon. His famous dandyism, his witticisms, paradoxes and provocations became the object of imitation and parody; his controversial aesthetic doctrines were a strong influence not only on decadent writers, but also on the development of symbolist and modernist cultures.

This collection of essays by leading international scholars and translators traces the cultural impact of Oscar Wilde’s work across Europe, from the earliest translations and performances of his works in the 1890s to the present day.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements List of Contributors Abbreviations

Reception Timeline, Paul Barnaby (Edinburgh University Library, UK)

Performance Timeline, Michelle Paull (St. Mary’s University College, UK)

Introduction: Oscar Wilde: European by Sympathy, Stefano Evangelista (University of Oxford, UK)

1. Picturing His Exact Decadence: The British Reception of Oscar Wilde, Joseph Bristow (UCLA, USA)

2. Performance and Place: Oscar Wilde and the Irish National Interest, Noreen Doody (St. Patrick’s College, Ireland)

3. The Artist as Aesthete: the French creation of Wilde, Richard Hibbitt (University of Leeds, UK)

4. Naturalizing Oscar Wilde as an homme de lettres: The French Reception of Dorian Gray and Salomé (1895-1922), Emily Eells (Université de Paris 10 – Nanterre, France)

5. André Gide’s ‘Hommage à Oscar Wilde’ or ‘The Tale of Judas’, Victoria Reid (University of Glasgow, UK)

6. ‘Astonishing in my Italian’: Oscar Wilde’s First Italian Editions, 1890-1952, Rita Severi (University of Verona, Italy)

7. ‘Children of Pleasure’: Oscar Wilde and Italian Decadence, Elisa Bizzotto (IUAV University, Venice, Italy)

8. The Strange Adventures of Oscar Wilde in Spain (1892-1912), Richard A. Cardwell (University of Nottingham, UK)

9. The Reception of Wilde’s Works in Spain through Theatre Performances at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, Marta Mateo (University of Oviedo, Spain)

10. Tragedy and the Apostle of Beauty: The Early Literary Reception of Oscar Wilde in Germany and Austria, Robert Vilain (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK)

11. Bunbury in Germany: Alive and Kicking, Rainer Kohlmayer and Lucia Krämer (University of Mainz and Leibniz University, Hanover, Germany)

12. When Critics Disagree, the Artist Survives. Oscar Wilde: An All-Time Favourite of the Viennese Stage in the Twentieth Century, Sandra Mayer (University of Vienna, Austria)

13. Composing Oscar: Settings of Wilde for the German stage, Chris Walton (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa)

14. From Continental Discourse to ‘A breath from a better world’: Oscar Wilde and Denmark, Lene Østermark-Johansen (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

15. An Ideal Situation? The Importance of Oscar Wilde’s Dramatic Work in Hungary, Mária Kurdi (University of Pécs, Hungary)

16. Oscar Wilde and the Czech Decadence, Zdenêk Beran (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)

17. The ‘Byron of Kipling’s England’: Oscar Wilde in Croatia, Irena Grubica (University of Rijeka, Croatia)

18. ‘Next to Christ’: Oscar Wilde in Russian Modernism, Evgenii Bershtein (Reed College, Oregon, USA) Index

Of the above, the following are Associate Editors of THE OSCHOLARS: Elisa Bizzotto, Stefano Evangelista, Irena Grubica, Lucia Krämer, Sandra Mayer, Lene Østermark-Johansen, Michelle Paull, Rita Severi

Two new Oscar Wilde plays

Lou Ferreira’s L’Ombre d’Oscar Wilde has been published in Paris by Elzévir (February 2010; ISBN : 9782811402679; €15.90) and in London The Oscar Wilde Society has published Thomas Wright’s Death in Genoa. For more on the latter, click here.

Samuel Lyndon Gladden announces Broadview’s publication of his edition of The Importance of being Earnest . Publication Date: November 30, 2009 250pp • Paperback ISBN: 9781551116945 / 1551116944. CDN & US $14.95; AUST $ 17.95. Click here for the publisher’s web site for the book.

C. Robert Holloway (www.crobertholloway.com) announces that The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde, his Hemingway prize-winning novel, is available once again in paperback from Amazonbooks.com, BarnesandNoble.com and XLibris.com.

Sergio Constán Valverde : Wilde en España: La presencia de Oscar Wilde en la literatura española (1882-1936). ISBN 8493698490. León: Akrón, 2009, 370 pp.

The Victorian Review’s 35: 1 (2009) issue begins with Keynotes on key Victorian texts, including Christine Ferguson on Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.” Its articles include Sandy Feinstein’s “Dracula and Chloral: Chemistry Matter.” Its reviews include Heather Worthington’s review of Paul Fox and Koray Melikoglu’s Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction.

‘Femme de siècle (Wilde/Strauss’s Salome)’ is the first section of Chapter IV (‘Sounding the Depths’) of Theodore Ziolkowski : Scandal on Stage, European theatre as moral trial. Cambridge University Press, October 2009, pp.59-72.

Herbert Lottman: Oscar Wilde en París. Tr. Javier Albiñana Serain. Barcelona: Tusquets 2009. ISBN: 978-84-8383-195-3

For reviews of this book in THE OSCHOLARS (by Marie-Noëlle Zeender) and RUE DES BEAUX ARTS (by Lou Ferreira) respectively, click here and here.

Elisa Glick : Materializing Queer Desire Oscar Wilde to Andy Warhol. SUNY Press $70.00 Hardcover $24.95 Paperback - 234 pages. August 2009. ISBN10: N/A ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2725-6

Uses iconic dandy and queer figures to explore relationships between homosexuality, modernism, and modernity.

How did the queer subject come to occupy such a central, and in many respects, contradictory place in the modern world of the early twentieth century? What role has capitalism played in the development of modern gay and lesbian identities? Materializing Queer Desire focuses on the figure of the dandy to explore how and why gay and lesbian subjects became heroes of modern life. Elisa Glick argues that the gay subject emerged out of the specifically modern, capitalist contradiction between the public world of production and industry and the private world of consumption and pleasure. Boldly bringing modernism into dialogue with Marxist and queer theory, Glick offers an innovative, materialist account of modern queer consciousness that challenges tendencies to oppose “private” eroticism and the systems of value that govern “public” interests. In the process she illuminates the connections between aesthetic, sexual, and social formations in modern life—between modernity’s disruptive, “queer” desires and their unfolding in an increasingly rationalized society.

Jon Macy has announced the release of his graphic novel Teleny and Camille, a 236 page black and white, perfect bound comic book adaptation of the anonymous Victorian novel Teleny, attributed to Oscar Wilde and his circle of friends, writers and poets.

Camille, a wealthy young gentleman in Victorian London, falls in love with the handsome and mesmerizing pianist Teleny. While Teleny performs on stage the two star-crossed lovers share a psychic link in the form of an erotic vision. Camille struggles to resist his homosexuality even while Teleny is being pursued by others of both sexes. After telepathically witnessing Teleny’s erotic encounters a despondent Camille attempts suicide. Teleny rescues Camille physically and emotionally with his rapturous love forsaking all others.

This is more than an erotic novel it is a rallying cry for homosexuality written by the aesthetic rebels of Oscar Wilde’s inner circle. Teleny was groundbreaking, powerful and possibly the very first truly Gay novel ever written. It is important not just for the unusually artistic handling of the erotic scenes, but for its rare glimpse into the, until now, hidden underworld of Gay life in Victorian times. In this edition I have chosen to expand beyond the text of Teleny by including the intrigue surrounding the involvement of Oscar Wilde, the clandestine manner in which the novel was written and a few other surprises of my own.

This signed and numbered limited edition feast of historical Gayness is available through Mr Macy’s website for $29.00. ($34.00 USPS.) ‘This is a thick heavy book on premium paper and exceptional print quality. I wanted this to be as good as I could make it and I think it is.’ - Jon Macy.

The bigger picture

The following are of more general interest, and also contain articles on Wilde.

Victorian Network – a new postgraduate journal

Victorian Network is an online journal dedicated to publishing and promoting the best postgraduate work in Victorian Studies. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the journal is guest-edited by established scholars in the field and peer-reviewed by doctoral students. Themed issues are published bi-annually in July and January. Each issue carries two kinds of articles: a set of traditional academic papers and a number of shorter, less formal essays which are dedicated to knowledge transfer and address a specified theme that is of interest to the wider community.

Its debut issue (Volume 1, Summer 1, 2009), guest edited by Dr Muireann O’Cinneide of the National University of Ireland, Galway, contains the following articles of especial interest: J. Stephen Addcox’s “Innoculation and Empire: “Cigarette’s healing power in Ouida’s Under Two Flags,” Qi Chen’s “Aristocracy for the Common People: Chinese Commodities in Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism,” and Theresa Jamieson’s “Working for the Empire: Professions of Masculinity in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and R. L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The issue is available at this site: http://www.victoriannetwork.org/index.php/vn/index

Trevor Harris (ed.): Art, Politics and Society in Britain 1880-1914 : Aspects of Modernity and Modernism. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 143p., ISBN 978-1-4438-1364-8 www.c-s-p.org

Chapter One

Some Reflections on Aspects of Modernity by John M. Mackenzie

Part I: The Artist as Exponent of the Modern

Chapter Two Modernities and Avant-Gardes: London and Paris 1900-1914 by David Cottington

Chapter Three William Morris: Socialist or Modernist? The Historical Contradictions of Craft by Trevor Harris

Chapter Four Modernity, Modernism and the Re-Definition of Architecture in the Arts and Crafts Movement by Isabelle Cases

Chapter Five Individualistic Socialism According to Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde by Magali Fleurot

Part II: Modernism and Politics

Chapter Six Visionaries or Reactionaries? British Anarchism and Modernity by Constance Bantman

Chapter Seven The “Crisis of Modernity” and Graham Wallas: A Modernist Turn in the British Study of Politics? By Arnaud Page

Chapter Eight The Eastern Question and Britain’s Foreign Policy (1876-1896) by Stéphanie Prévost

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe and Gregory F. Tague (edd.): Origins of English Dramatic Modernism,1870 – 1914. Palo Alto,CA Academica Press

Description: The aim of this volume is to examine nascent movements, genre shifts, developing authors/playwrights and controversial themes as they emerged in both drama and theatre. The editors have focused on the essence of creative nexus of London from the end of the nineteenth century up to the beginning of the Great War (1914). The resultant study discusses Gordon Craig and production design, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, Pinero, Strindberg, Harley Granville Barker, Jones, Archer, Ford Madox Ford, D.H.Lawrence, Galsworthy, Sims, women playwrights, popular theatre among other topics.

The work complements J.L.Styan’s 3 volume Modern Drama in Theory and Practice and is more focused on late 19th/early 20th c transitions and dramatic breakthroughs than Modern British Drama of Christopher Innes.

Joan Schenkar, author of Truly Wilde: the Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Interesting Niece (2000), has now published The Talented Miss Highsmith: the Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (New York : St Martin’s Press December 2009). This reveals for the first time Highsmith’s obsession with Wilde. Publication was supported by an essay by Ms Schenkar, ‘Patricia Highsmith & Oscar Wilde: the Dark Lady of American Letters Meets Her Match in Père Lachaise’, which can be found by clicking on the link. To introduce this, Joan Schenkar writes the following specially for THE OSCHOLARS:

Perhaps the least explored terrain in the world of Wilde scholarship is the influence Oscar’s life and work have had on American writers of all genres. Patricia Highsmith, The Dark Lady of American Letters and the subject of my new literary biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith, was both inspired and influenced by Oscar Wilde from the time she was seventeen years old.

It’s 12 July, 1962. And it’s Paris. Patricia Highsmith –- the forty-one year old author of such dark-hearted fictions as Strangers On a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Deep Water -- has just emerged from a lengthy ride on the Paris Metro. Her alabaster skin and almond eyes have already begun to show the signs of her drinking and her disappointments.

Pat enters an imposing gate set in a stone wall so long she can’t see the end of it, keeping her eyes on her size 9 1/2 shoes as they walk her up and over the hilly, cobblestoned streets of France’s largest literary gathering ground: Père Lachaise cemetery. She is as interested in counterfeit, forgery and homosexuality as the still-dishonoured gentleman she has come to visit…

OTHER PUBLICATIONS ON THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE

Rachel Teukolsky : The Literate Eye, Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics. June 2009. ISBN13: 9780195381375ISBN10: 0195381378 Hardback, 336 pages $35.00

In Victorian Britain, authors produced a luminous and influential body of writings about the visual arts. From John Ruskin’s five-volume celebration of J. M.W. Turner to Walter Pater’s essays on the Italian Renaissance, Victorian writers disseminated a new idea in the nineteenth century, that art spectatorship could provide one of the most intense and meaningful forms of human experience.

In The Literate Eye, Rachel Teukolsky analyzes the vivid archive of Victorian art writing to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century authors in the rise of modernist aesthetics. Though traditional accounts locate a break between Victorian values and the experimental styles of the twentieth century, Teukolsky traces how certain art writers promoted a formalism that would come to dominate canons of twentieth-century art. Well-known texts by Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde appear alongside lesser-known texts drawn from the rich field of Victorian print culture, including gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, and tracts on early photography. Spanning the years 1840 to 1910, her argument lends a new understanding to the transition from Victorianism to modernism, a period of especially lively exchange between artists and intellectuals, here narrated with careful attention to the historical particularities and real events that informed British aesthetic values.

Lavishly illustrated and marked by meticulous research, The Literate Eye offers an eloquent argument for the influence of Victorian art culture on the museum worlds of modernism, in a revisionary account that ultimately relocates the notion of "the modern" to the heart of the nineteenth century.

Features :

Presents the first and only cultural history of Victorian art writing-a crucial topic among Victorian essayists

Combines study of canonical authors with analysis of texts drawn from Victorian print culture

Features over fifty illustrations, ranging across high, middlebrow, and popular culture; images include paintings, sculptures, prints from illustrated books and magazines, photographs, and cartoons

Grace Brockington (ed.) : Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle. Series Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts  Vol. 4. Peter Lang : Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. XIV, 354 pp., 6 coloured and 21 b/w ill. ISBN 978-3-03911-128-2  pb

This collection of essays stems from the conference ‘Internationalism and the Arts: Anglo-European Cultural Exchange at the Fin de Siècle’ held at Magdalene College, Cambridge, in July 2006. The growth of internationalism in Europe at the fin de siècle encouraged confidence in the possibility of peace. A wartorn century later, it is easy to forget such optimism. Flanked by the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were marked by rising militarism. Themes of national consolidation and aggression have become key to any analysis of the period. Yet despite the drive towards political and cultural isolation, transnational networks gathered increasing support. This book examines the role played by artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals in promoting internationalism. It explores the range of individuals, media and movements involved, from cosmopolitan characters such as Walter Sickert and Henri La Fontaine, through internationalist art societies, to periodicals, performance, and the mobility of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The discussion takes in the geographical breadth of Europe, incorporating Belgium, Bohemia, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Russia and Slovakia. Drawing on the work of scholars from across Europe and America, the collection makes a statement about the complexity of European identities at the fin de siècle, as well as about the possibilities for interdisciplinary research in our own era.

Contents:

Grace Brockington: Introduction: Internationalism and the Arts;

Anna Gruetzner Robins: Walter Sickert and the Language of Art;

James G. Mansell: Music and the Borders of Rationality: Discourses of Place in the Work of John Foulds;

Rosalind P. Blakesley: ‘The Venerable Artist’s Fiery Speeches Ringing in my Soul’: The Artistic Impact of William Morris and his Circle in Nineteenth-Century Russia;

Andrzej Szczerski: The Arts and Crafts Movement, Internationalism and Vernacular Revival in Central Europe c.1900;

Neil Stewart: The Wildes of Bohemia: The Cosmopolitan Voice of Modern Revue;

Matthew Potter: Cambridge University and the Germanist Bridge: The Aesthetics and Politics of Internationalism at the Fin de Siècle;

Petra Rau: The Trouble with Cosmopolitans: Ford and Forster between Nation and Internationalism;

Tore Rem: Ibsen and Shakespeare: Insularity and Internationalism in Early British Ibsen Reception;

Anne Leonard: Internationalist in Spite of Themselves: Britain and Belgium at the Fin de Siècle;

Daniel Laqua: Transnational Endeavours and the ‘Totality of Knowledge’: Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as ‘Integral Internationalists’ in Fin-de-Siècle Europe;

Hannes Schweiger: Between the Lines: George Bernard Shaw as Cultural and Political Mediator;

Grace Brockington: ‘A Jacob’s Ladder between Country and Country’: Art and Diplomacy before the First World War.

The Editor: Grace Brockington is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Bristol and a convenor of the research network ICE (‘Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870-1920’). After completing an M.A. in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, London, and a D.Phil. on modernism and the peace movement in Britain between c. 1900 and 1918 at the University of Oxford, she held research fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford, and Clare Hall, Cambridge. She has published articles on the Bloomsbury group, Vernon Lee, First World War theatre, pacifist publishing, and women’s art clubs. Her book Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement 1900-1918 is forthcoming.

Francesca Orestano / Francesca Frigerio (edd.) : Strange Sisters Literature and Aesthetics in the Nineteenth Century. Peter Lang : Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. XX, 304 pp., 20 ill. Cultural Interactions. Studies in the Relationship between the Arts. Vol. 9 Edited by J.B. Bullen. ISBN 978-3-03911-840-3 pb. sFr. 56.– / EUR* 38.50 / EUR** 39.60 / EUR 36.– / £ 36.– / US-$ 55.95 * includes VAT – only valid for Germany / ** includes VAT – only valid for Austria / € does not include VAT

This collection of essays stems from the conference “Nineteenth-Century Literature and Aesthetics”, which was held at the University of Milan in 2006 and organised by the editors of this volume. The interface between word and image covered in these essays embraces the fields of literature, architecture, painting, photography, music and art criticism. The authors stress the role of aesthetics in a number of contexts ranging from the early 1830s to the “fin de siècle” and beyond, as far as the last influences of Victorian taste on the early years of the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century the ancient interaction between literature and aesthetics was challenged and criticised by Martineau, Rossetti, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Beardsley, Cameron and Carroll, among others: their awareness of the complexity of visual perception problematised the existing categories of realism, artistic conventions, discourse of description, translation and representation. The essays cover almost a century of debate between literature and aesthetics. They focus on the intersection of word and image by emphasising transgressions in art hierarchies, forms and languages, which restyle existing categories and project them into new aesthetic dimensions beyond the conventional idea of the sister arts.

Contents:

Francesca Orestano: Introduction;

Luisa Calè: “Belinda” and Exhibition Culture: Fiction, Pictures and Imaginary Ekphrasis;

Maria Luisa Roli: A Voyage by Balloon: Stifter’s “Condor”;

Lucy Bending: ‘Fishing in a Strange Element’: Harriet Martineau and the Visible World;

J.B. Bullen: Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Primitivism and the Continent of Europe;

Paola Spinozzi: Journeying through Translation: Dante among the Victorians, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Medieval Italy;

Francesca Orestano: Across the Picturesque: Ruskin’s Argument with the Strange Sisters;

Alberta Gnugnoli: Famous Men and Fair Ladies: Genius, Creativity and Beauty in the Portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron;

Francesca Frigerio: Out of Focus: A Portrait of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll;

Graham Smith: Michelangelo’s “Duke of Urbino” in Literature, Travel-Writing and Photography of the Nineteenth Century;

Marialuisa Bignami: Sir Joshua and the Historian: Portraits in George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda”;

Hilary Fraser: Through the Looking-Glass: Looking like a Woman in the Nineteenth Century;

Elisa Bizzotto: Blurring the Confines of Art and Gender: Aubrey Beardsley’s “Legend of Venus and Tannhäuser”, ‘The Fragment of a Story’;

Linda Goddard: Gauguin’s Guidebooks: “Noa Noa” in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Travel-Writing;

Alexandra Harris: The Antimacassar Restored: Victorian Taste in the Early Twentieth Century.

The Editors:

Francesca Orestano is Associate Professor of English Literature at the State University of Milan and works on the connections between literature and aesthetics, picturesque and visual culture, modernism, children’s literature, landscape gardening and Charles Dickens. Francesca Frigerio received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the State University of Milan. In the same year, she was awarded a fellowship with the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University.

Direct order: http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vLang=E&vID=11840

Heike Bauer announces her new book, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion 1860-1930 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=320403

Michael John DiSanto : Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009.

Conrad’s novels are among the great works of fiction, but they should also be counted as great works of criticism in English. A voracious reader throughout his life, Conrad wrote novels that question and transform the ideas he encountered in non-fiction, novels, and scientific and philosophic texts.

Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism examines Conrad’s revaluations of some of his important nineteenth-century predecessors, Carlyle, Darwin, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Detailed readings of works from Heart of Darkness to Victory explore Conrad’s language and style by focusing on perplexing questions regarding the will to know and the avoidance of knowledge, the potential harmfulness of sympathy, and the competing instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction. Comparative analyses show how Conrad transforms Bleak House into The Secret Agent and Middlemarch into Nostromo. Especially compelling are the explorations of Conrad’s ambivalence towards Carlyle’s faith in work and hero-worship as rejuvenators of English culture and towards Nietzsche’s assault on Christianity.

This important new study of Conrad, a novelist of profound contemporary relevance, demonstrates how he exemplifies the artist as critic while challenging both the categories we impose on texts and the boundaries we erect between literary periods.

Linda Dryden, Stephen Arata and Eric Massie (edd.) : Stevenson and Conrad: Writers of Transition. Texas Tech University Press ISBN: 978-0-89672-653-6 Price: $55

The first collection of essays to examine RL Stevenson within the context of Joseph Conrad, the volume has an introduction by Linda Dryden followed by essays by experts in the fields of Stevenson and Conrad studies: Richard Ambrosini, Eric Massie, Nathalie Jaëck, Laurence Davies, Andrea White, Monica Bungaro, Ann C. Colley, Robbie B. H. Goh, Robert Hampson, Deaglán ó Donghaile, Martin Danahay, Jane V. Rago, Nancy Bunge and Stephen Donovan.

Thomas Albrecht: The Medusa Effect Representation and Epistemology in Victorian Aesthetics. SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture. December 2009. $75.00 Hardcover; $23.95 Paperback - 176 pages. ISBN10: N/A ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2867-3; ISBN10: N/A ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2868-0

Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy.

Focusing on the recurring metaphor of Medusa’s head, The Medusa Effect examines images of horror in texts by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a series of Victorian artists and critics writing about aesthetics. Through nuanced and innovative readings of canonical works by Freud, Nietzsche, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, A.C. Swinburne, and George Eliot, Thomas Albrecht demonstrates the twofold nature of these writers’ images of horror. On the one hand, the analysis illuminates how the representation of something seen as horrifying—for instance, a disturbing work of art, an existential insight, or a recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of another person’s consciousness—can serve a protective purpose, to defend the writer in some way against the horror he or she encounters. On the other hand, the representations themselves can be a potential threat—epistemologically unreliable, for instance, or illusory, deceptive, fundamentally unstable, and potentially dangerous to the writers. Through a psychoanalytically informed literary analysis, The Medusa Effect explores crucial ethical and epistemological questions of Victorian aesthetics, as well as under-examined complexities of the mechanisms of Victorian literary representation.

v Thomas Albrecht is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University.

Mark Hearn: ‘"Contamination": Cardinal Moran and Fin de Siècle Australian National Identity, 1888-1911’, Journal of Religious History, Volume 34 Issue 1 (March 2010) (pp 20-35). Mark Hearn is a lecturer at the Department of Modern History in Macquarie University. This article was researched as part of a project, "Changing the Face of the World: The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia, 1890-1914" conducted by the author as the C.H. Currey Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales. The author wishes to acknowledge the support provided by the SLNSW and the Mitchell Collection staff.

Laurence Davis and Ruth Kinna (edd.): Anarchism and Utopianism. Manchester University Press 2009 304pp hb 9780719079344. £60.00

The first book-length treatment of the relationship between anarchism and utopianism, this book breaks new scholarly ground and provides a new focus of analysis in the field of utopian studies and draws on largely neglected historical case studies to illuminate contemporary anarchist academic and activist debates about ecology, alternatives to capitalism, revolutionary theory and practice, and the politics of art, gender and sexuality.

Introduction – Laurence Davis;

Part I Historical and philosophical overview;

1. Anarchism and the dialectic of utopia – John P. Clark ;

Part II Antecedents of the anarchist literary utopia;

2. Daoism as utopian or accommodationist: radical Daoism reexamined inlight of the Guodian Manuscripts – John A. Rapp;

3. Diderot's *Supplément au voyage de Bougainville*: steps towards an anarchist utopia – Peter G. Stillman  ;

Part III Anti-capitalism and the anarchist utopian literary imagination;

4. Everyone an artist: art, labour, anarchy, and utopia – Laurence Davis;

5. Anarchist powers: B. Traven, Pierre Clastres, and the question of utopia – Nicholas Spencer;

6. Utopia, anarchism and the political implications of emotions – Gisela Heffes ;

7. Anarchy in the archives: notes from the ruins of Sydney and Melbourne – Brian Greenspan;

Part IV Free love: anarchist politics and utopian desire;

8. Speaking desire: anarchism and free love as utopian performance in fin de siècle Britain – Judy Greenway;

9. Visions of the future: reproduction, revolution and regeneration in American anarchist utopian fiction – Brigitte Koenig;

10. Intimate fellows: utopia and chaos in the early post-Stonewall gay liberation manifestos – Dominic Ording;

Part V Rethinking revolutionary practice ;

11. Anarchism, utopianism and the politics of emancipation – Saul Newman;

12. Anarchism and the politics of utopia – Ruth Kinna;

13. 'The space now possible': anarchist education as utopian hope – Judith Suissa;

14. Utopia in contemporary anarchism – Uri Gordon;

v Laurence Davis is Lecturer in Politics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Ruth Kinna is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Loughborough University.

The True Bill Press has recently published a new and annotated edition of W.T. Stead’s The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, the classic exposure of child prostitution in late 19th century London by this prominent investigative journalist. Stead’s report was published serially in his newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, in 1885 and has never before been published in full as a monograph. This report had a tremendous public impact and is largely credited with an enactment of a crucial piece of legislation, the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885. (It also earned Stead a term of imprisonment). A lengthy description of the book can be found at our website: http://TheTrueBillPress.com.

Rick Albright announces the publication of his book, Writing the Past, Writing the Future: Time and Narrative in Gothic and Sensation Fiction, published by Lehigh University Press/Associated University Presses. ‘My project links popular British fiction from the 1790s through the 1860s to anxieties about time; forces such as the French Revolution and developments in science and technology combined to transform the experience of time and dramatize its aporetic nature--time as inarticulable contradiction. My book highlights the narrative strategies that attempt to reconcile these aporias in the following novels: Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne. ISBN-10: 0980149649 ISBN-13: 978-0980149647.’

The Review of English Studies 2009 #60 contains David G. Riede’s review of Catherine Maxwell : Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature [Full Text] [PDF] and David Finkelstein’s review of Shafquat Towheed (ed.). The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901–1930. [Full Text] [PDF]

Matthew Rubery : The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 233 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-536926-7. A review by Jonathan Rose (Drew University) was published on H-Albion (January, 2010). http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25386.

The Henry James Review Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2009

‘This issue collects, for the first time, Colm Tóibín’s critical essays on Henry James. Tóibín’s best known engagement with James is probably his 2004 novel The Master, which grapples with the style and substance of Henry James’s work and life. I mention Tóibín’s novel at the start because the great strength of his criticism is that he reads and writes like a writer. In taking up James, Tóibín joins poet-critics including Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, James Baldwin, Richard Howard, and Cynthia Ozick. As this list alone illustrates, reading James as a writer is a various business. What’s shared is that these are critics who write from the inside: as fellow artisans who understand the craft of writing and read to discover, precisely and fully, the workings of this particular novel or letter or essay. Such criticism is profoundly interested, and that interest makes for acuity. It is serious (Why else bother? Writers have their own books to write) but, at its best, never solemn, as these essays happily illustrate. "James, like most artists," Tóibín informs us, "knew what he was doing only some of the time" (BL).

The Master retells a period in Henry James’s life. These essays follow suit insofar as, for Tóibín, understanding James’s work demands attention to the scenes and situations of writing. This concern with biography is the very opposite of the literary criticism that James’s stories so often warn against: reading past or through the artist’s work to discover some hidden truth about his life...’

Table of Contents

Colm Tóibín on Henry James Introduction Susan M. Griffin pp. 207-210

Henry James In Ireland: A Footnote Colm Tóibín pp. 211-222

The Haunting of Lamb House Colm Tóibín pp. 223-226

A More Elaborate Web: Becoming Henry James Colm Tóibín pp. 227-236

Pure Evil: "The Turn of the Screw" Colm Tóibín pp. 237-240

The Lessons of the Master Colm Tóibín pp. 241-243

Henry James’s New York Colm Tóibín pp. 244-259

A Death, a Book, an Apartment: The Portrait of a Lady Colm Tóibín pp. 260-265

Reflective Biography Colm Tóibín pp. 266-271

A Bundle of Letters Colm Tóibín pp. 272-284

All a Novelist Needs Colm Tóibín pp. 285-288

The Later Jameses Colm Tóibín pp. 289-299

Kate Macdonald (ed.): Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty-Nine Steps (Pickering & Chatto 2009), a collection of essays on and about the life and works of Buchan, publisher, novelist, politician, war correspondent, historian, Imperialist, and governor-general. This will be the subject of a one-day conference on Buchan to be held in London, 10th July 2010: ‘John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity’. The call for papers can be found at: http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/2010/Buchan/index.htm

Gender & History Volume21, Issue3, 2009 contains Jane Hamlett’s ‘”The Dining Room Should Be the Man’s Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman’s”: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850–1910 Abstract.

Victorian Literature and Culture Volume 37, Number 2 (2009) contains the following articles among others:

The Colonial Postcard: The Spectral/Telepathic Mode in Conan Doyle and Kipling by Bishnupriya Ghosh

“Loathsome London”: Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey’s History of English Music (1895) by Bennett Zon

The Play with a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero’s New Drama by Heather Anne Wozniak

Vampiric Seduction and Vicissitudes of Masculine Identity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula by Dejan Kuzmanovic

“A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original”: Mabel Wotton, Aestheticism, and the Dilemma of Literary Borrowing by Sigrid Anderson Cordell

“A Preface is Written to the Public”: Print Censorship, Novel Prefaces, and the Construction of a New Reading Public in Late-Victorian England Barbara Leckie

Cosmetic Tragedies: Failed Masquerade in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady by Aviva Briefel

Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone by Mark Mossman

The Tragic Mulatta Plays the Tragic Muse by Kimberly Snyder Manganelli

“He Sings Alone”: Hybrid Forms and the Victorian Working-Class Poet by Kirstie Blair

Work in Progress

The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes by Anna Neill

Four free online Victorian studies books from Ohio University Press.

Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture by Barry J. Faulk

The Wake of Wellington: Englishness in 1852 by Peter W. Sinnema

Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction by Lisa Surridge

The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914 by Brent Shannon

They can be downloaded in pdf form from the following address by clicking on "download full PDF" (clicking on the book title will allow you to buy the book, if you prefer): http://www.ohioswallow.com/ebooks

Joseph Frank : Dostoevsky, A Writer in His Time. With a new preface by the author. Princeton University Press

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of two James Russell Lowell Prizes of the Modern Language Association Winner of two Christian Gauss Awards of Phi Beta Kappa Co-winner of the Etkind Prize of the European University at St. Petersburg

To read the entire book description or the prelude, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8976.html

Joseph Frank’s award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank’s monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

Michael R. Finn (Ryerson University, Toronto ): Hysteria, Hypnosis, the Spirits and Pornography: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde. University of Delaware Press, 2009. 288 pp.

This book explores the life and fiction of the French decadent writer Rachilde (pen-name of Marguerite Eymery), using her as a case-study to examine the impact late 19th century theories about female hysteria, medical hypnotism, mediums and spiritualism had on the female creative psyche. Rachilde was especially vulnerable as she suffered hysterical attacks, witnessed a hypnotism craze in France, and was the only child in a family of table-rapping spiritualists. After a biographical first section, chapters examine how hysteria, hypnotism and spiritualism penetrated the socio-cultural fabric of France in the 1870-1900 period, and how Rachilde’s novels represented, unconsciously absorbed or at other times mocked those discourses. Because she was prosecuted for the “obscenity” of her first major success, Monsieur Vénus, this study also situates her writing comparatively within the production of other late-century pornographers. A final chapter analyzes how Rachilde’s work confronts the disabling doctrines of her time and how, out of them, she constructs a unique and productive writing stance.

Miranda Gill : Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Oxford University Press 2009. This was reviewed by Venita Datta in French History March 2010; Vol. 24, No. 1 [Full Text] [PDF]

Gabrielle Townsend : Proust’s Imaginary Museum, Reproductions and Reproduction in À la recherche du temps perdu. 2008. 232 pp., 4 coloured and 2 b/w ill. (Series, Cultural Interactions: Studies in the Relationship between the Arts. Vol. 5 Edited by J.B. Bullen) ISBN 978-3-03911-124-4 pb. sFr. 77.– / EUR* 52.60 / EUR** 54.10 / EUR 49.20 / £ 32.– / US-$ 76.95 * includes VAT – only valid for Germany / ** includes VAT – only valid for Austria / EUR does not include VAT. Direct order: http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vLang=E&vID=11124

This study of Marcel Proust’s creative imagination examines an aspect of the novel that has hitherto been largely overlooked: the author’s dependence on secondary visual sources. Proust made constant use of reproductions – photographs, engravings, postcards, illustrations in books – as sources of reference and as narrative devices in their own right. Furthermore, he consistently chose to use reproductions in preference to originals, whether people, places or works of art. Bringing together for the first time a mass of factual information documenting Proust’s use of second-hand images, the author argues that reproductions play a key role in the work’s complex, multi-layered structure. Rather than being hampered by their limitations, Proust took advantage of their distancing effect to free his imagination and to insert new layers of meaning into his narrative.

Contents: Proust’s reliance on the reproduced image – The reproduction of art: real and fictional works of art in À la recherche du “temps perdu” – Proust and photography: portraits and imagery: The Narrator as collector and photographer - The photograph in the context of time, death and memory - The ‘photographic’ narrative techniques of “À la recherché” – The structural role of reproductions: The character of the reproduction as sign - The reproduction and metaphor.

v Gabrielle Townsend read Modern Languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. After a career at a senior level in publishing she returned to academic study, gaining an M.A. in Cultural Memory at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London, and then went on to complete a D.Phil. on Proust at Oxford University, supervised by Prof. Malcolm Bowie. She currently helps edit an academic journal and tutors Oxford undergraduates in French literature.

French Studies, October 2009; Vol. 63, No. 4 contains the following :

Robert Lethbridge : Émile Zola: La Fabrique des ‘Rougon-Macquart’: Édition des dossiers préparatoires. [Full Text] [PDF]

Margaret Topping : Pierre Loti and the Theatricality of Desire. [Full Text] [PDF]

Timothy Unwin : Le Récit de vengeance au XIXe siècle: Mérimée, Dumas, Balzac, Barbey d’Aurevilly. [Full Text] [PDF]

Cécilia Falgas-Ravry : Les Romans de la Salpêtrière. Réception d’une scénographie clinique: Jean-Martin Charcot dans l’imaginaire fin-de-siècle. [Full Text] [PDF]

Adam Watt : Proust and Joyce in Dialogue. [Full Text] [PDF]

Sjef Houppermans : Proust, Beckett and Narration. [Full Text] [PDF]

Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (edd.) : Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer, Paris 1830-1914. 456 pages, 37 halftones, 5 musical examples, 16 tables 7 x 10 © 2009. Cloth $55.00 ISBN: 9780226239262. Published December 2009. E-book from $5.00 to $55.00 (about e-books) ISBN: 9780226239286

Opera and musical theater dominated French culture in the 1800s, and the influential stage music that emerged from this period helped make Paris, as Walter Benjamin put it, the “capital of the nineteenth century.” The fullest account available of this artistic ferment and its international impact, Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer explores the diverse institutions that shaped Parisian music and extended its influence across Europe, the Americas, and Australia.

The contributors to this volume, who work in fields ranging from literature to theater to musicology, focus on the city’s musical theater scene as a whole rather than on individual theaters or repertories. Their broad range enables their collective examination of the ways in which all aspects of performance and reception were affected by the transfer of works, performers, and management models from one environment to another. By focusing on this interplay between institutions and individuals, the authors illuminate the tension between institutional conventions and artistic creation during the heady period when Parisian stage music reached its zenith.

Chantecler, by Edmond Rostand (Genge Press, 2010); ISBN 978-0-9549043-4-0; 310 pages; A5 paperback; price £10.50, Euros 12. With English introduction, notes and brief chronology.

February 2010 will see the centenary of Edmond Rostand’s play Chantecler. To mark this centenary, the Genge Press is publishing the original French text with explanatory footnotes, chronology and an introduction in English by Sue Lloyd, M. Phil., author of The Man who was Cyrano, a Life of Edmond Rostand, Creator of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ . See www.gengepress.co.uk for more about Chantecler.

Our aim is to make this important French play more accessible to scholars and students at both school and university level. Available from booksellers, online booksellers or direct from gengepress@aol.com.

Sue Lloyd, Genge Press, 45 Quay St., MINEHEAD TA24 5UL, England.

Chantecler, par Edmond Rostand (Genge Press, 2010); ISBN 978-0-9549043-4-0; 310 pages; broché; prix: £10.50, Euros 12 ; autres prix à demander. Avec introduction, notes and chronologie en anglais.

Cette édition marque le centenaire de Chantecler en février 2010. Elle vise à mettre plus accessible aux étudiants anglophones cette pièce importante. (Voir www.gengepress.co.uk pour plus d’information sur Chantecler.)

On peut obtenir cette édition des librairies en ligne, ou directe de gengepress@aol.com.

Sue Lloyd, Genge Press, 45 Quay St., MINEHEAD TA24 5UL, Angleterre.

www.gengepress.co.uk

miscellAnæous

AN OPEN LETTER FROM PROFESSOR J.B. BULLEN

Dear All,

Though I met many people at the conference in Montpellier, I did not meet everybody so please excuse this rather impersonal approach. My reason for writing to you is to draw your attention to the series, ‘Cultural Interactions’, that I edit with the publisher Peter Lang. Its aim is to produce good monographs on inter-arts topics and since so much of the work done in Montpellier came into that category, I thought that you might like to know about it. I am keen to continue to find authors working in this area, and you may be doing just that. From the attachment you will see that the Cultural Interactions has gone from strength to strength and is beginning to become a serious platform for academics working in interdisciplinary studies. Once they have the typescript, Peter Lang works quickly and the result, as you will see if you have a look at one of the volumes, professional and elegant.

Please get in touch with me if you have any ideas for a volume or would like to discuss this further.

With very best wishes

Barrie

Prof. Barrie Bullen School of English and American Studies Reading University Reading RG6 2AA

‘NEW ONLINE BOOK REVIEW AIMS TO REVOLUTIONIZE ACADEMIC REVIEWING’

Launched at Dartmouth College on September 1, 2009, nbol-19.org is an Online Review of Books on English and American Literature of the Nineteenth Century. Sponsored by the Department of English and the Dean of Humanities, it is edited by James Heffernan with technical guidance from Thomas Luxon and editorial advice from an international group of thirty-three specialists in nineteenth-century literature. This site aims to revolutionize academic reviewing. While academic studies of literature must normally wait at least two years to be reviewed in printed journals , this site will strive to assess new books within ninety days of their publication, will invite authors to respond to each review within thirty days of its submission, and will also welcome comments from visitors to the site. Taking advantage of web resources, its reviews will include pictures from the books it reviews and links to relevant material on other sites. With reviewers ranging from graduate students to chaired professors and emeriti, this site has commissioned just over one hundred reviews of books published in 2009, is already posting nearly thirty of them, and aims to have the rest up by next April. Meanwhile, its Books Announced list for 2009 briefly describes all the books it will review.

234x156mm 304pp

www.nbol-19.org HB 978-0-7190-7934-4 £60.00 SPECIAL PRICE £45.00

The Directory of Antiquarian and Secondhand Bookshops has now been published by the (British) PBFA. This free Directory is available either at a PBFA Book Fair or telephone the PBFA office on 01763 248400 or click here for the PBFA website.

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