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Issue no 50 : May / June 2009

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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
An Ideal Husband
Wilde and Patience
Wilde and Shaw
OTHER PUBLICATIONS OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE INTEREST
Literature By Design: British And American Books 1880-1930
Études Anglaises
i.m. Margot Louis
Dandies
Du Maurier
Flaning
Forged
Jerome
Masculinity
Mirbeau
William Morris
Photography
Puck
Ruskin
Symbolism
Tennant
Vienna

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review; and we are always willing to consider for publication abstracts or précis of journal articles or published or unpublished doctoral theses.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.

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 new section 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 87, Number 1, 2008.

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PUBLICATIONS BY / ON OSCAR WILDE

teleny

With no reservations about ‘attributed to’ or ‘and others,’ the Paris publisher Musardine has issued an edition of Teleny in its series ‘Lectures amoureuses’. This is edited with an introduction by Jean-Jacques Pauvert.

Oscar’s BOOKS

Thomas Wright’s book of this name has been republished in the United States under the title Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde. It is published by Henry Holt at a modest $27.00.

Wilde and evil

Dana Aicha Shaaban: Broken Homes: The Impact of Evil on Family in Wilde's Works. VDM (Verlag Dr. Müller) 2009.

Dorian Gray

Xavier Giudicelli : ‘Illustrer The Picture of Dorian Gray : les paradoxes de la représentation’ in Études Anglaises n°1 (janvier-mars 2009)

Children's stories by Oscar Wilde
Read by Stephen Fry – audiobook
Harperpress; unabridged edition (30 April 2009)
ISBN-10: 0007316380

The model millionaire: stories (short story collections) Harper Perennial (28 April 2009)
ISBN 006177376X

We also remind readers of the publications on Wilde noted in our previous issue:

SALOME

Atsuko Ogane : La genèse de la danse de Salomé ―Flaubert, Moreau, Mallarmé, Wilde. Keio University Press 2008.

The Importance of being Earnest

Ruth Robbins: York Notes on The Importance of Being Earnest. 4th impression. London: Longman / York Press 2008.

The Decay of Lying

Oscar Wilde: The Decay of Lying. Richmond, Surrey: One World Classics 2008.

REQUIESCAT

John Wyse Jackson (ed.): Dublin, Poetry of Place. London: Eland Books 2008. This anthology contains Wilde’s ‘Requiescat’.

BOOKS, ARTICLES & PAPERS OF GENERAL FIN-DE-SIÈCLE INTEREST

Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880-1930

In 2007, Rice University Press (http://rup.rice.edu) returned from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. Our technology, developed by Rice University’s Connexions (http://cnx.org) program, offers authors a way to exploit our dual publications platform to craft new forms of dynamic scholarly argument. Our titles range from print-only, through simultaneous print and online editions that are more or less identical, to print versions with online counterparts that are far more robust and that can include multimedia elements. Rice University Press titles are viewable in their entirety online for free, and available at reasonable cost in print form through our print-on-demand partner, QOOP, Inc. (http://qoop.com).

With the publication of a new edition of Gelett Burgess’ classic Le Petit Journal des Refusées, Rice University Press launches an important new scholarly series, Literature by Design: British and American Books 1880-1930. Edited by Jerome McGann and Nicholas Frankel, the series consists of important literary works published between 1880 and 1930 that foreground the vehicle of the book and the visible nature of language itself. These groundbreaking books have long been out of print, confined to library rarebook collections and inaccessible to students and teachers by virtue of the expense and difficulty of reprinting their exquisite designs. Literature by Design titles incorporate facsimile reproductions of the original editions—all of which are noteworthy for the role design and typography played in shaping readers’ responses—along with new critical material by leading contemporary scholars.

Rice University Press has seventeen new Literature by Design titles scheduled over the next two years, including works by Stephen Crane, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, W.B. Yeats, John Gray, Ezra Pound, William Morris, Laurence Housman, Ella Hepworth Dixon, “Michael Field,” Lady Wilde, “George Egerton,” and other luminaries of literature and design. All Literature by Design titles will be viewable in their entirety online at no cost, and available for purchase in print form.

The series’ inaugural title, Le Petit Journal des Refusées, first published in 1896, is noteworthy for the remarkable degree of selfconsciousness with which it exposed the social nature of aesthetic production. Le Petit Journal stands now as an engaging and thought-provoking artifact of late nineteenth-century international cosmopolitan culture. The publication is at once parodic and original, a work recognizing and declaring that artistic creation begins in the social sphere. When the artist and writer Gelett Burgess published this one-of-a-kind sixteen-page pamphlet, printed on wallpaper, trimmed to a trapezoidal shape, and full of parodic references, he was making a critical argument about cultural networks and industries as well as creating an original and unique piece of humor. Noted scholar Johanna Drucker brings Le Petit Journal back to light in this new facsimile edition, brilliantly explicated by her Afterword detailing the intellectual ferment of the time and placing Burgess’ work in a worldwide cultural context.

For more information, please visit our web site or contact our editor-in-chief, Fred Moody, at 206-855-0933 or by email.

ÉTUDES ANGLAISES

The following articles have been published in Études Anglaises n°1 (janvier-mars 2009):

Isabelle Cases : John Ruskin, prophète du désastre dans ‘Traffic’ ; Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada : ‘Passing into the great romantic loves of rebellious flesh’: medieval religion and the body in Walter Pater’s ‘Poems by William Morris’ and ‘Two Early French Stories’; Claire Murray-Masurel : ‘A chalice empty of wine’ : l’imaginaire sacramentel dans la littérature fin de siècle en Angleterre.

i.m. MARGOT LOUIS

The Victorian Review Editorial Team is delighted to announce the publication of its special issue (34.2) honouring the memory of our colleague & friend Margot K. Louis (1954-2007).

Lisa Surridge writes ‘In keeping with Margot's excellence in teaching and scholarship, we honour her with an issue that combines a forum on Teaching the Victorians with a special research focus on Victorian Literature & Classical Myth both areas of passionate interest and commitment for Margot. We welcome Catherine Maxwell as guest editor of this special focus section.’

The Teaching the Victorians forum features short essays by leading scholars on

 *   Teaching Victorian Poetry and the Body

 *   Teaching Victorian Pornography

 *   Using Performance in the Classroom

 *   Teaching Victorian Literature in the Context of Photography

 *   Teaching Victorian Illustrated Poetry: Hands-On Material Culture

*   A Victorian Study-Abroad Course for Undergraduates

The section on Victorian Literature & Classical Myth features an introduction by Catherine Maxwell in addition to essays as follows:

 *   D. M. R. Bentley, ‘Of Venus and of Cupid,- Strange Old Tales’ in the Work of D. G. Rossetti

*   Elizabeth Prettejohn, Solomon, Swinburne, Sappho

*   Yisrael Levin, The Terror of Divine Revelation and the Incorporation into Song: The Challenges of Swinburne's Apollonian Poetry

*   Roslyn Jolly, Nympholepsy, Mythopoesis, and John Addington Symonds

*   Meilee Bridges, The Eros of Homeros: The Pleasures of Greek Epic in Victorian Literature and Archaeology

 *   J. Michael Walton, Dionysus: The Victorian Outcast

*   Stefano Evangelista, A Revolting Mistake: Walter Pater's Iconography of Dionysus

*   Patricia Pulham, From Pygmalion to Persephone: Love, Art, Myth in Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved

For subscription and ordering information, please see our website: http://web.uvic.ca/victorianreview/contents.html

Dandies

Nottingham French Studies announces the publication of Volume 48.1, Spring 2009, ISSN 0029-4586, which includes the article ‘Anarchist Dandies, Dilettantes and Aesthetes of the Fin de Siècle’ by Ali Nematollahy.

DU MAURIER

Nathalie Saudo-Welby : The ‘over-aesthetic eye’ and the ‘monstrous development of a phenomenal larynx’: Du Maurier’s art of excess in Trilby. Études Anglaises n°1 (janvier-mars 2009).

Flaning

Le Flâneur et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à l'époque romantique

Catherine Nesci

Préface de Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson

Editions Littéraires et Linguistique de l’Université de Grenoble : Collection Bibliothèque Stendhalienne et Romantique

Peut-on concevoir un équivalent féminin du flâneur, cet observateur mobile et esthète de la rue que Walter Benjamin présentait jadis comme un outil conceptuel pour penser la ville moderne ? Si l'hégémonie du flâneur reste indéniable dans les documents et la réalité des pratiques urbaines, le rôle que les femmes jouent dans la culture romantique de la flânerie et le journalisme littéraire reste encore à interroger. Peut-on cerner les contours de la flâneuse, comme on a fait du flâneur un type aux incarnations diverses dans la culture parisienne du XIXe siècle? Les flâneuses sont-elles des flâneurs incomplets, voire épisodiques ? Autant de questions auxquelles cet essai apporte des réponses nuancées, à partir d'une étude renouvelée de la figure du flâneur dans le Paris romantique. Parcourant d'abord la scène mouvante de la flânerie populaire, puis son incarnation dans le roman balzacien, l'interrogation se porte ensuite vers les pratiques de marche dans la ville, d'écriture de la ville et de construction de soi chez Delphine de Girardin, George Sand et Flora Tristan. Exprimant un imaginaire tout à la fois citadin et féminin, ces écrivaines traduisent une soif de nouveaux cadres d'expérience et de représentation pour les femmes dans la ville.

2007 – 440 p. – 14 x 21,5 cm – ISBN 978 2 84310 105 2 – prix 32 €. Table des matières

Forged

Sara Malton: Forgery in Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde

Palgrave Macmillan 2009. 200 pp. £42.50. Hardcover. ISBN-10: 0230612229 ISBN-13: 978-0230612228

jerome

The Jerome K Jerome Society has recently published a book to mark the 150th anniversary of the author’s birth, this year. Entitled Idle Thoughts on Jerome K Jerome, can be found on the Society’s website, where it is also available for direct purchase.

This cornucopia of Jeromian writing celebrates the 150th anniversary of JKJ’s birthday, a mixture of scholarly, revelatory and whimsical contributions to Idle Thoughts, the newsletter published at irregular intervals over the past 23 years by the Jerome K Jerome Society. As well as several rare pieces by Jerome himself, it contains many previously unknown facts about his ancestry and career, reveals aspects of the domestic life he kept private, reassesses some of his work that has fallen into undeserved obscurity, and includes the first comprehensive Jerome bibliography.

Requests for review copies, bulk purchase arrangements and discounts should be addressed to Jeremy Toynbee, Project Manager and Director, Toynbee Editorial Services Ltd, Unit 24a, The Bardfield Centre, Great Bardfield, Essex CM7 4SL. T: +44 (0)1371 811608; F: +44 (0) 870 288 9730. jeremy@toynbee-editorial.co.uk / www.toynbee-editorial.co.uk

masculinity

Amy Milne-Smith: ‘Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century London.’ Gender & History Volume 21, Issue1, 2009. Published Online: 13th March 2009. Abstract

mirbeau

Pierre Michel and the Société Octave Mirbeau announce

1. Les éditions du Lérot, de Tusson, viennent de publier la Correspondance entre Octave Mirbeau et Jules Huret, le fondateur du journalisme moderne, 290 pages, 35 euros (22 euros franco pour les adhérents de la Société Mirbeau). Ce volume est composé de 105 lettres, en grande majorité inédites et abondamment annotées, et comporte, en annexe, sept textes et interviews de Mirbeau sur Huret et de Jules Huret sur Mirbeau. On y trouve aussi un cahier de 8 pages d'illustrations, une chronologie, une bibliographie et un index. Ci-dessous la présentation du volume dans le quatrième de couverture.

2. Le tome III de la Correspondance générale d'Octave Mirbeau, qui couvre les années 1895-1902, et notamment l'affaire Dreyfus et la bataille des Affaires sont les affaires, sortira début juin chez l'Age d'Homme, Lausanne. 950 pages, 78 euros (45 pour les adhérents de la Société Mirbeau). Mirbeau étant en relations avec les plus notoires écrivains et les artistes novateurs de son temps, et ayant participé activement à toutes les luttes majeures de la Belle Époque, sa correspondance constitue une mine pour les chercheurs.

Quatrième de couverture de la Correspondance Octave Mirbeau - Jules Huret :

[Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917) et Jules Huret (1863-1915) étaient deux journalistes influents, qui ont contribué à dépoussiérer la vieille presse et qui, tout au long de leur carrière, ont démasqué les faux semblants de la société bourgeoise. Ils ont, chacun à sa manière, mis en œuvre une éthique de la révélation, qui constitue aussi une esthétique. L'un par une lutte incessante contre tous les conformismes et toutes les aliénations, par des coups d'éclat médiatiques destinés à frapper l'opinion publique, et en mettant à nu, dans son oeuvre littéraire comme dans ses articles, les tares rédhibitoires d'hommes et d'institutions abusivement respectés. L'autre, moins tonitruant que son illustre aîné, grâce à une habile pratique de l'interview, qui amène les puissants de ce monde à révéler à leur insu le fond de leurs âmes, puis par des enquêtes longues et approfondies, révélant le dessous des cartes, qu'il a menées à travers le monde, au mépris de sa propre santé. Pendant un tiers de siècle, Octave Mirbeau et Jules Huret ont été liés d'amitié. Confrontés aux mêmes difficultés, également dégoûtés par le journalisme et la littérature de leur temps, ils ont vibré d'une même révolte, et leur correspondance, restée inédite jusqu'à ce jour, témoigne de leur complicité et de leur fraternité spirituelle. Les lettres échangées entre deux écrivains qui ne se cachent rien et qui savent admirablement manier la plume ne sont pas seulement un constant et décapant plaisir de lecture. Elles constituent aussi un document exceptionnel sur la France de la Belle Époque et apportent une masse d'informations précieuses sur la vie journalistique, littéraire et politique, dans une ère de bouleversements idéologiques, sociaux et esthétiques.]

William Morris

Anna Vaninskaya: Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century. Nineteenth-Century Contexts An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 31 Issue 1 2009

photography

Daniel A. Novak: Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture). 250 pp. Cambridge University Press 2008). ISBN-10: 0521885256; ISBN-13: 978-0521885256

Puck

Google has put Puck magazine online for 1880 and 1884, with hundreds of full-colour political and social cartoons. Each volume is in pdf format and can be downloaded. Each page can be copied and pasted using the PRT SC key.

Ruskin

Anuradha Chatterjee: ‘Tectonic into Textile: John Ruskin and His Obsession with the Architectural Surface. ’ Textile, Volume 7, Issue 1, pp. 68–97 DOI: 10. 2752/175183509X411771. Reprints available directly from the Publishers

Abstract

This paper considers the architectural writings of John Ruskin (1891–1900), an important architecture, art and social critic in Victorian England and interprets his preoccupation with surface ornament. The paper reveals that, for Ruskin, architecture was a living entity. His idea of life was influenced by Thomas Carlyle’s philosophy of clothes, according to which the human soul was more important than the body and it could be expressed only through clothing. Ruskin translated this notion into an architectural theory. He believed that the soul of architecture was contained in the veneer of decoration that concealed the exterior walls. In addition, he argued that the composition of the decorative veneer exhibited qualities of dresses and textiles. This article terms this as Ruskin’s theory of the adorned “wall veil”. It argues that this was the motivation for his interest in the architectural surface. The article counters the claim that Ruskin’s writings were unarchitectural or, in other words, unconcerned with space, structure and function. It argues that the theory of the adorned wall veil attempted to shift the ontological identity of architecture. It also contributed to the nineteenth century debates on architectural ornament and dress.

v Anuradha Chatterjee is Editor of THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day

symbolism

Le Miroir des légendes de Bernard Lazare (1892)

Présenté et annoté par Bertrand Vibert

Le Roi au masque d'or (1892)

Présenté et annoté par Michel Viegnes et Sabrina Granger

Editions Littéraires et Linguistique de l’Université de Grenoble : Collection Bibliothèque Stendhalienne et Romantique

Le Symbolisme est tout entier placé sous le signe de la Poésie. Or celle-ci ne se limite pas à un genre littéraire, même si l’influence de Mallarmé sur la jeune génération symboliste a pu le laisser croire. De fait, la Poésie est alors une valeur fédératrice qui englobe le théâtre que l’on songe à Maeterlinck ou au jeune Claudel, mais aussi le domaine prestigieux du conte. Dans la dernière décennie du XIXe siècle, au moment même où le Positivisme semble triompher, le conte symboliste connaît un âge d’or et voit paraître plusieurs recueils importants, qui revendiquent aussi l’héritage des « contes cruels » de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.

Sont présentés dans ce premier volume Le Miroir des légendes de Bernard Lazare, dont on propose la première réédition depuis sa publication en 1892, ainsi que Le Roi au masque d’or de Marcel Schwob, publié la même année. En inaugurant une nouvelle collection conçue comme un recueil de recueils, ce sont les facettes multiples d’un univers largement méconnu que cette édition voudrait faire découvrir.

2009 – 491 p. – 13 x 20 cm – ISBN 978-2-84310-133-5 – 33 €

Table des matières (pdf)

tennant

David Waller: The Magnificent Mrs Tennant, a life of Gertrude Tennant (1819-1918), Victorian grande dame has been published by Yale University Press.

‘Known hitherto as a footnote to lives of great men such as Flaubert or Henry Morton Stanley (whose mother-in-law she became in 1890), Gertrude is a fascinating historical personality in her own right.

‘Born on the west coast of Ireland after her father's ship ran aground, she grew up in genteel poverty amid the expatriate English community in 1820s and 1830s Paris, where she attended children's balls at the courts of Kings Charles X and Louis-Philippe and developed an intense friendship with the young Flaubert. After Flaubert's sister Caroline died in 1846, Gertrude returned to England, determined to remake herself as a respectable Englishwoman. In that spirit, she soon married Charles Tennant, a lawyer, landowner and former Member of Parliament old enough to be her father, and lived in Bloomsbury for twenty years as an obscure wife and mother, a privileged member of the "silent sisterhood" of middle-class Victorian women.

‘It was only after she was widowed in 1873 that she found her vocation as a salonnière, opening up her home (by now in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall) to politicians, artists, writers and actors. Among many celebrities, Gladstone, Oscar Wilde, Henry Irving, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, Mark Twain all attended her salon, and Henry James came in search of ideas for short stories. Even Rudyard Kipling paid a visit as a boy, brought along by his uncle Edward Burne-Jones. Meanwhile her two talented daughters Dorothy and Eveleen had their portraits painted by Watts and Millais and were encouraged to develop their artistic talents -- Dolly as a painter and Eveleen as a photographer -- as well as to find eligible husbands. Eveleen married Frederic Myers, friend of George Eliot and founder of the Society for Psychical Research, while Dolly married Stanley in 1890. Gertrude herself never remarried, but in later life she was reunited with Flaubert in Paris, and the book draws on some two dozen of his original letters to her that found during the course of the author’s researches, many of which are hitherto unknown and unpublished.

‘To put her life in context, six uncles died in the Napoleonic Wars, and a grandson fell in the trenches of the Somme. Her parents might have stepped out of a Jane Austen novel, and she and her husband moved into Russell Square in the months that Thackeray's Vanity Fair was first published, and they were thus neighbours in spirit to the fictional Sedleys and Osbornes. Her husband's endless lawsuits parallel those of Bleak House, and there was something Jamesian about her fin de siècle salon. Her daughters, not exactly New Women, would not have been out of place in the novels of E.M. Forster.’

Vienna

Madness and Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900

Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp with contributions by Nicola Imrie, Luke Heighton, Sabine Wieber and Geoffrey C. Howes. Lund Humphries: April 2009. Price :  Hardback £35.00; Online: £31.50

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

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