An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

Concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Issue no 45 : July 2008

oscholars@gmail.com

Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), Oscar Wilde. Pencil, ink, and watercolour, [ca. 1894-1900]

© Estate of Max Beerbohm. Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library

This featured prominently in the Facing the Late Victorians exhibition, the Grolier Club, New York, 21st February–26th April 2008.

EDITORIAL PAGE

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

Since November 2007 we have split this page into two sections.  SECTION I now 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. 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS I: ITEMS ON THIS PAGE
I.  NEWS from the Editor; changes to our team; innovations on the website; our discussion forum.	5.  Work in Progress	XI.  OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE
II.  In the LIBRARY	6.  A Wilde Collection	XII.  VIDEO OF THE MONTH
III.   NEWS, NOTES & QUERIES	IV. OSCAR WILDE : THE POETIC LEGACY	XIII.  WEB FOOT NOTES
1. Cigarettes	V. TEACHING WILDE / WILDE ON THE CURRICULUM	XIV.  OGRAPHIES
2.  Oscar Wilde and Gemstones	VI.  THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	XV.  NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES
3. J.F. McArdle	VII. DANDIES, DRESS AND FASHION	XVI. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS
4.   Alexander Teixieira de Mattos	VIII. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH	XVII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
5.  ‘Passion’s Pleasure’	IX. LETTER FROM IRELAND & INTERVIEW WITH NEIL BARTLETT	XVIII. Supplement: Melmoth
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray	X.  BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS

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

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

I. NEWS FROM THE EDITOR

Innovations

In our last issue we announced that our Editorial team strengthened by three new appointments. Patricia Flanagan Behrendt joined us as American Theatre Editor. Until her early retirement she was a Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, specialising in History and Theory. She is the author of Oscar Wilde : Eros and Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan 1991). Under her guidance we will be expanding not only our coverage of Wilde and other fin-de-siècle playwrights on the American stage, but placing this in the context of Wilde and fin-de-siècle studies in contemporary America. Dr Behrendt took over this post from Tiffany Perala, who in future will be putting together a section of THE OSCHOLARS addressed to and encouraging undergraduate writing on Wilde. In this she will be working in harmony with Andrew Eastham, who is investigating the teaching of Wilde and Decadence, and thus developing our reportage of Wilde on the curriculum into an examination of the pedagogical issues involved. Dr Eastham was awarded a doctorate from University of London for a project entitled ‘The Ideal Stages of Aestheticism’, and is currently a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, London and Brunel University, and has recently taught at King’s and Goldsmiths Colleges in London. Additionally, we announced that, in conformity with our wish to improve our coverage of the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle, we were creating a small team of art historians, where Isa Bickmann has been joined by Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch of the National Gallery in Dublin, and by Sarah Turner, who is finishing her doctorate at the Courtauld Institute in London; since then this team has been joined by Nicola Gauld of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This has stimulated us into gathering the visual arts material – chiefly announcements and reviews of exhibitions and publications – and gathering them into a new section called VISIONS. We hope this will expand with the appointment of further Associate Editors.

We also announced that we had been joined by Valerie Fehlbaum of the University of Geneva and Irena Grubica of the University of Rijeka. Dr Fehlbaum is editing an anthology of essays by other members of our team (we will be announcing more about this in a future issue) and Dr Grubica is our Associate Editor for Illyria, by which apolitical and rather literary conceit we are designating the western Balkans.

We also recorded two losses: Maureen O’Connor and Tina O’Toole found that they were no longer able to reconcile their work with us and their other commitments. Dr O’Connor has been succeeded by Aoife Leahy, who is the current President of the National Association of English Studies, the Southern Ireland affiliate of the European Society for the Study of English. Dr Leahy’s second Letter from Ireland will be found below, followed by her interview with Neil Bartlett. We have now found a successor for Dr O’Toole, so being our plan for a section of THE OSCHOLARS addressed to the New Woman, heralded in a previous issue, is no longer in abeyance. The ‘successor’ is in fact a small team of successors, Jessica Cox of the University of Lampeter, Kathleen Gledhill of the University of Hull, Petra Dierkes-Thrun of the State University of California at Northridge, Christine Huguet of the University of Lillie III – Charles de Gaulle, and Alison Laurie of Victoria University in Wellington. This group is joined by Sophie Geoffroy, editor of The Sibyl, to ensure co-ordination of effort. This means that we have enlarged our ambition, and we will be launching a new journal called THE LATCHKEY in September / October. This will have its own mailing list, and we encourage interested readers to sign up for this. We will be calling for papers later.

Other new recruits to our team are Krisztina Lajosi (University of Amsterdam), and Tijana Stasic (University of Gothenburg) who will be reporting on publications, productions, exhibitions and scholarly activity in Hungary and Sweden; and Emma Alder (Napier University, Edinburgh) and Julie-Ann Robson (University of Sydney), who succeed Michèle Mendelssohn as Scotland Editor and Angela Kingston as Australia Editor, who are too heavily committed elsewhere. To these are added Naomi Wood (Kansas State University) who will be editing a special supplement on Oscar Wilde and Children’s Literature for late Spring, 2009; Carmen Casaliggi (University of Limerick), who will be assisting Anuradha Chatterjee with our journal of Ruskin Studies, THE EIGHTH LAMP; and, last but certainly not least, Annabel Rutherford (York University, Toronto), who becomes our Dance Editor.

This issue of THE OSCHOLARS announces the creation of two new rubrics. ‘Dandies, Dress and Fashion’ will be compiled for us by Elizabeth McCollum, whose opening statement we publish below, and Melmoth, edited by Sondeep Kandola, which will cover the Gothic aspects of the fin-de-siècle. Melmoth can be found at the very end of this page.

Work continues on the reconstruction of the website, with improvements in accessibility and design, so that it becomes a fully-searchable and easily navigated resource.  This involves less scrolling and more clicking, enabling us decrease the length of pages.  Various pages have been split up, and new ones created.  This is largely the inspiration (and wholly the hard work) of our webmaster, Steven Halliwell. VISIONS is one result of this; another is THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day, under the energetic editorship of Anuradha Chatterjee. A third manifestation is the folder of webpages devoted to the Oxford Conference on ‘The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe’, which took place at Trinity College on 8th/9th March. These pages will be kept up and expanded, collaborating on-line with Stefano-Maria Evangelista, who is editing the book for which the Conference was the advance guard.

To see all our team, click ;

to see VISIONS, click ;

To see THE EIGHTH LAMP, click ;

to see the Oxford pages, click

Our special supplement on Teleny, to be published in Autumn 2008, is on course.  This is being guest edited by Professor John McRae of the University of Nottingham, whose edition of Teleny was the first scholarly unexpurgated one published.  Readers who would like to submit an article discussing any aspect of Teleny should contact Professor McRae  @.

So many chances and changes have necessitated constant revisions in our publishing schedules, with ONLY RUE DES BEAUX ARTS under Danielle Guérin’s editorship maintaining its intended two-monthly appearance on time, although after a shaky start to the year THE OSCHOLARS seems back on track. This has been balanced by our publishing new content on our website nearly every day, and announcing this in weekly reports on our ‘yahoo’ subsidiary. The number of our readers who have joined this has been growing, and it will be increasingly our medium for making announcements in the place of mass mailings, which increasingly fall foul of anti-spam traps either at the sending or receiving end. We do urge readers to sign up to this group. Our NOTICEBOARD also serves all our journals. Here we publish short term announcements of lectures, publications, papers and other items of interest submitted by readers.  This does not replace notice in any of the journals, but is intended to be of value between issues.  The ‘yahoo’ forum and NOTICEBOARD can be reached via their icons. 

II. THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

From time to time, we have invited 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.

Since September 2007, we have been putting such articles on line at the rate of one a week, and are very happy with the response that this has been meeting. These appear in a section called LIBRARY.  Its logo, which can be clicked for access, is

This will bring you to a Table of Contents, arranged thematically, from which you can link to each article.  There are also links to French language articles similarly republished in rue des beaux-arts.

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

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 New postings are announced weekly on our discussion forum

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

Cigarettes

Robert Sherard writes that when he was living in Wilde’s flat in London he smoked Parascho cigarettes. Does anyone have any information on these (the internet offering no help)? The reference is Robert H. Sherard: Oscar Wilde, the Story of an Unhappy Friendship. London: Greening & Co. 1905. Popular edition 1908 p.90. We have discovered what must be one of the earliest examples of Wilde inspired merchandise:

Oscar Wilde and Gemstones

 We are not sure if this subject has been studied, and would like to hear if it has. Hans-Christian Oeser sends this note:

I searched for alchemy and gems and male properties, and found the opposition vir rubeus/mulier candida as in the following (which is sort of applicable to The Young King I would think: redness/whiteness, heavenly coronation etc.):

See Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, p. 5, n. 4: ‘Senior says: “I joined the two luminaries in marriage and it became as water having two lights’ (De chemia, p. 15 f.),” and p. 4: “The opposites and their symbols are so common in the texts that it is superfluous to cite evidence from the sources ... Very often the masculine-feminine opposition is personified as King and Queen ... or as servus (slave) or vir rubeus (red man) and mulier candida (white woman); in the “Visio Arislei” they appear as ... the King’s son and daughter.’ In a footnote, Jung adds: “The archetype of the heavenly marriage plays a great role here.’

Vir rubeus, virile ruby - same thing, n'est-ce pas?

And then I found this about male rubies (in German):

‘Bezogen auf die Farbe, kann man bei den Rubinen auch eine Unterscheidung in männliche oder weibliche finden. Zum Beispiel werden die dunkelroten Rubine dem Mann und die hell-rosaroten der Frau zugeordnet.’

And lo and behold, A Florentine Tragedy in French:

‘Un rubis viril enflamme l’agrafe, comme un charbon ardent. Le Saint-Père n’a pas de telle pierre, Et les Indes ne pourraient lui trouver de frère. La boucle elle-même est d’un grand art. Cellini, jamais, ne créa plus belle chose pour le délice’ etc.

This seems to offer a way into the subject, and we would be very willing to consider for publication a developed article.

J F McArdle

Hilary Wilson is researching 19th century theatre and performance in Sheffield for a University of Sheffield Ph.D.  She writes ‘One amusing reference/link with Wilde that I have found so far is in a comedy called 'Flint and Steel' by J F McArdle (1881).  A devotee of the 'aesthetes' is made rather a figure of fun, and ends up being locked in a china cupboard...’ We hope it was a blue china cupboard.

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos

Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (‘Tex’; 1865-1921) married the widow of Willie Wilde and deserves more than that particular tag. We will return to him in future: here we have taken the opportunity to download and reproduce his bookplate. As his name is sometimes given as ‘Texeira’, we can see his preferred spelling.

‘Passion’s Discipline’

This was the title of an exhibition held 2nd May to 2nd August 2003 at the New York Public Library. Oscar Wilde was represented by a number of items drawn from the Berg Collection at the Library.

1. Photograph of Wilde by Napoleon Sarony, signed by Sarony.

2. Oscar Wilde: ‘Lotus Land’, autograph MS signed O.F.O’F.W.W.

3. Oscar Wilde: ‘Impression du Voyage’, autograph MS, unsigned ca.1880.

4. Oscar Wilde: ‘Quantum Mutata’ and ‘Libertatis Sacra Fames’, pages displayed in the edition Poems, London: David Bogue 1881.

5. Oscar Wilde: ‘E Tenebris’, page displayed in the edition Poems, London: Elkin mathe3ws and John Lane 1892. No. 135 of 220 copies printed and signed by the author.

6. Oscar Wilde: ‘Ave Maria Plena Gratia’.

This is from a collection of pieces by Wilde copied out in a hand-written anthology by the Belfast author Forest Reid in 1903. This anthology has a cover drawing in the manner of Beardsley, thought to be by Reid. Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection, is keen to hear from anyone working on Forest Reid who may have information on his interest in Wilde. We note that Reid did write a novel called The Bracknels.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray was broadcast in two episodes on the wireless station BBC7 on Wednesday 2nd and Thursday 3rd July 2008. The novel was adapted by Nick McCarty and the leading parts were played by Ian McDiarmid and Jamie Glover.

Work in Progress

In December 2006 we published a list of fin-de-siècle doctoral theses being undertaken at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a similar list in December 2007.  We should very much like to hear from readers at other universities with news of similar theses they are supervising or undertaking.  We welcome all news of research being undertaken on any aspect of the fin de siècle. There is a list of dissertations on Irish literature held on the Princess Grace Irish Library website (http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_gazette/disserts/a/) but it seems to be impossible to gain access.

Jason Boyd (University of Toronto) has kindly sent us an abstract and bibliography of his work on Oscar Wilde and Victorian Edutainment: Lecture Tours as 19th-Century Itinerant Entertainment, and we are publishing this in ‘And I? May I Say Nothing?’ .

A Wilde Collection

There is no universal handbook or vade mecum to the various Wilde Collections, and we have made a start here.  Sometimes where a collection’s contents are published in detail on-line we will simply give an URL; or we may be able to give more details ourselves.  We will then to be able to bring these together as a new Appendix.

The Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (General Collection of Rare Books and Manuscripts) has a small Oscar Wilde collection listed on line in June 1997 and last updated in February 2000. Its casemark is Gen MSS 275.

IV. OSCAR WILDE : THE POETIC LEGACY

In our last issue we gave some publicity to ‘Wilde Tribute Poem - Prison Number C.33’, part of a collection called ‘Bramble Lane’ by the Dublin poet Patrick Shortall. Mr Shortall has now kindly given us permission to publish this in a version that he has transcribed using his own punctuation. Copies of Bramble Lane can be ordered directly from Pat Shortall on 087-2393062 (00353-87-2393062 outside Ireland). The CD was recorded at Panchord Studios and manufactured by Trend Digital Media.

“Wilde Tribute Poem – Prison Number C.3.3.”

In Reading gaol there is no bail

Nor freedom of any chance

Just the smell, of a living hell

And a warder there to glance

With no one there no joy to share

Mad spirits come to prance

On a poor old soul, locked in a hole

And dies in Paris, France

From bleak cell walls, where madness falls

And drips to a cell floor

A playwright who was once so great

Is locked behind a door

His mind is chained, with hands refrained

Not writing anymore

A brain is now a prisoner

Torturous thoughts of what’s in store

In Reading gaol there is no bail

Nor freedom of any chance

You do your time whatever your crime

Appeals get but a glance

For C.3.3. it’s sad to see

A man so great destroyed

Alas! your fate cannot be changed

Your genial works enjoyed

(Read after poem) C.3.3. Oscar Wilde’s

Prison Number, Block C, Floor 3, Cell 3.

V. Wilde on the Curriculum : Teaching Wilde, Aestheticism 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; in tandem Tiffany Perala is looking at undergraduate response. Here Andrew Eastham presents his introductory declaration of aims and objects:

This new strand of THE OSCHOLARS provides a space for academics, teachers and students to reflect on the ways that Wilde, Aestheticism and Decadence are being taught and disseminated. We will be sharing resources, providing an overview of courses and methods, sharing our experience as teachers and imagining new ways of reanimating the fin de siècle in the classroom. Although the main focus will be on departments of English in Europe and North America, we are interested in hearing from scholars worldwide about their practice. In some postings we will focus on the teaching of specific texts by Wilde and others, in others we will take a larger focus on issues such as the teaching of performance in Aesthetic culture, the relative roles of cultural history and textual scholarship, teaching Wilde and sexuality, or teaching Aestheticism as a movement. In the opening discussions I will introduce some of the broader decisions involved in teaching Aestheticism and Decadence and assess current academic trends on the following questions. How do we construct courses on Aestheticism and Decadence historically and conceptually? Can we provide an adequate focus on the multiple issues of contemporary scholarship – cultural history, theoretical aesthetics and sexual identity politics – within an introductory course? Do we teach Wilde as theory, literature, or drama? Are Pater’s model of the ‘aesthetic critic’ and Wilde’s ideal of the ‘Critic as Artist’ still alive in the classroom today? How do we encompass the breadth of artistic media embraced by Ruskin, Pater, Wilde or Lee in the classroom?

It’s reasonable to assume that any teacher working in this area has at some point had to temporarily forge an intellectual identity well outside the confines of their research: it is arguably simply not enough to be a literary scholar to teach Aestheticism and Decadence, and we may have to temporarily don the mask of the critic of painting, architecture, music or dance. In true Wildean fashion, though, these forgeries might well lead to vital areas of our research and the most felicitous subjects for the classroom. In personal experience, being forced to dissimulate a speciality in fin de siècle visual culture to a mixed group of Fine Art and Literature students opened my eyes to relations between image, text and music that I’d hitherto addressed only in theory. In cases like this, a pact emerges – if the students are implicitly aware that we are learning on the job, we hope for their generosity in allowing for a shared discovery. This kind of experience is integral to an area where we cannot hope to master all contexts, especially since British Aestheticism and Decadence incorporates such a vast array of European literary and artistic reference. Furthermore, the theoretical sources of Pater, Wilde or Symonds’s work are vast, encompassing Kant, Schiller, Fichte and Hegel, British Empiricism, Spencer’s Sociology and the Natural Sciences. And even if we consider ourselves master of these intellectual traditions, another scholar will claim that late Victorian periodicals should be our primary resource. Any teacher thus faces a choice; do we limit the archive to a space where the teacher retains a safe grasp on academic authority, or do we open our study beyond the borders of our knowledge – allow for a sea of textual echoes that we will never quite have control over? Then there is the choice of just how much weight we give to the intellectual contexts of Late Victorian Aestheticism when they are wielded so provocatively by a figure like Wilde? Should we train students to use the voluminous and hugely influential theoretical architectures of Hegel’s Aesthetics or Spencer’s Sociology, or do we risk the accusation of a certain earnestness which goes too far against the spirit of Wilde himself?

These personal choices are very clearly connected to broader academic debates, and the study of the Victorian fin de siècle encapsulates many of the most pressing issues of modern scholarship and pedagogy. The recently fashionable demand for ‘Interdisciplinarity’ has always been a necessary and vital condition of fin de siècle scholarship, and Wilde provides an extraordinary example of intellectual and cultural border crossings. Furthermore, If historicism has been ascendant in Victorian literary studies for over a decade now, then Wilde’s work offers both an argument for such practice, in his own dissertation on ‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’, and an ideal space to question such orthodoxies, in the brilliant play with historical scholarship and forgery of ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’. The latter work, along with his dialogues ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’, suggest the kind of challenge that Wilde offers to contemporary teachers of literature. When faced with such dazzling examples of scholarly innovation, how can we live up to Wilde, both in style and breadth of thought? Can we respond to this challenge within the dominant pedagogic model of historical periodization, or do Wilde and Aestheticism call for new teaching methods that incorporate creative writing or experimental critical forms? One of the ways of asking this question will be to allow teachers from different academic disciplines to challenge each other’s practice. Of all academic disciplines based on creative practice, English literature has effected the most radical divorce between criticism and practice. The significant growth in creative writing across English Departments in Britain and America may change this, but what kinds of dialogue can we envisage between the critical and creative wings of the academy? The differences in the way that literature and drama are taught will be one of the most important ways that we will address this question; the question is central to the teaching of Wilde, and the Oscholars has always been a vital format for tracing dramatic and critical practice together. But equally, the declining role of theory in the classroom needs to be a central issue. Pater and Wilde were innovative theorists who were writing during the emergence of academic literary studies – Pater was ambiguously positioned within the academy and Wilde within the growing apparatus of consumer culture. Critics like Regenia Gagnier, Ian Small and Jonathan Freedman have used these ambiguous positions as the means to reflect on the conditions of professional criticism and the role of art in society. Our aim here is to continue these kinds of debates around teaching practice. I’ll begin by introducing a year long MA course on ‘Aestheticism and Decadence’ which I taught recently and discussing some of the decisions and problems this involved, before going on to canvass the opinions of a wide variety of scholars. We’d be very grateful to any teachers and students who want to offers their opinions and send us links to their resources; our purpose is to broaden the teaching community as well as provide a space for thought.

Contact THE OSCHOLARS at oscholars@gmail.com or Andrew Eastham at @.

Here is the list of prescribed texts for the Irish Leaving Certificate Examination in English, 2008. ‘As the syllabus indicates, students are required to study from this list: One text on its own from the following texts: -‘BRONTË, Emily: Wuthering Heights; ISHIGURO, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day; JOHNSTON, Jennifer: How Many Miles to Babylon?; Mc CABE, Eugene: Death and Nightingales; MILLER, Arthur: The Crucible; MOORE, Brian: Lies of Silence; O’CASEY, Sean: The Plough and the Stars; SHAKESPEARE, William: Othello; WILDE, Oscar: The Importance of Being Earnest.

Florina Tufescu (Dalarna University) sends us the following:

Wilde courses: Undergraduate: ‘Major Authors: Oscar Wilde and the 90s’. Spring 2003 Prof. Stephen Tapscott. Syllabus, assignments and additional resources from Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Literature/21L-705Spring2003/CourseHome/index.htm

The Importance of Being Earnest – As A-level, EFL module at the Swedish School in Fuengirola, Spain 2000 FT – As undergraduate seminar on ‘Past and Present’ course at the University of Exeter 2005 FT – As postgraduate seminar on the ‘Ireland in Film and Drama’ course at Dalarna University, Sweden 2006–including clips from the 1988 BBC production–was taught again on 14th March 2008–course materials and student responses accessible via www.du.se (open access).

De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol Postgraduate seminar at Dalarna University that also included Banville’s Book of Evidence 2007 FT

Lady Windermere’s Fan Teaching ideas supplied by Andrew Maunder (University of Hertfordshire) on the English Subject Centre website http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/resources/t3/curriculum.php?topic=10

The Oscar Wilde Society of America and the Indiana State University Honors Program held an Oscar Wilde Symposium on 31st March 2008, Indiana State University Terre Haute, Indiana, featuring presentation of new American Wilde scholarship by Indiana State University honors students and a keynote address by Dr Joan Navarre. This event was free and open to the public. For more information contact Marilyn Bisch, @

The following is copied from the invaluable VICTORIA RESEARCH WEB: Teaching Resources

Nineteenth-Century History

The Victorian Novel

Special Topics in Victorian Culture

Victorian Literature Surveys

Victorian Poetry

Few things are more helpful in planning a course than seeing how others have laid out similar courses. Sharing syllabi is one of the most fruitful uses of the Web, and a number of Victorianists have made course plans available online for the benefit of both students and colleagues. If you would like to contribute a syllabus for posting here, either as a link to a website or as a text file, please contact the webmaster.

A variety of additional materials, many of which are especially suited for use by primary and secondary school teachers, can be found below under Other Teaching Resources. Again, if you'd like to contribute additional materials like these we'd be glad to have them. A handy place to search the Web for syllabi on particular topics is the Syllabus Finder at the Center for History and New Media.

VI. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

Last issue’s review section contained reviews by Maria Kasia Greenwood on Leslie Clack’s Oscar Wilde in Paris, Elżbieta Baraniecka on Oscar Wilde’s Bunbury in Augsburg, María DeGuzmán on Junot Díaz on Oscar Wao, Elisa Bizzotto on Michael Kaylor on Oscar Wilde, Pater and Hopkins, Liberato Santoro-Brienza on Elisa Bizzotto on Imaginary Portraits, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on Andrew Mangham on Violent Women, Susan Cahill on Laurence Tailarach-Vielmas on women’s bodies, Laurence Talairach-Vielmas on Ann Stiles on neuorology, Michael Patrick Gillespie on Madeleine Humphreys on Edward Martyn, Chantal Beauvalot on Georges-Paul Collet on Jacques-Emile Blanche, Linda Zatlin on Rodney Engen on Aubrey Beardsley, D.C. Rose on Alexandra Warwick on Oscar Wilde.

These can be seen by clicking .

Current reviews are Ann M. Bogle on Thomas Kilroy on Constance Wilde; Richard Fantina on Adrian Wisnicki on Conspiracy; Tina Gray on Joy Melville on Ellen Terry; Christine Huguet on divers hands on Michael Field; Yvonne Ivory on Lucia Krämer on Oscar Wilde; Sondeep Kandola on Corin Redgrave on Oscar Wilde; Ruth Kinna on Brian Morris on Peter Kropotkin; Mireille Naturel on Evelyne Bloch-Dano on Jeanne Proust; Maureen O’Connor on Jarlath Killeen on Oscar Wilde; Gwen Orel on the Pearl Company on Earnest; Virginie Pouzet-Duzer on Rhonda Garelick on Loïe Fuller.

These can be seen by clicking .

Clicking    will take you to a Table of Contents for all our reviews, which we are updating.  We welcome offers to review from readers.

VII. DANDIES, DRESS AND FASHION

Editor for this section: Elizabeth McCollum

A new section is debuting in this issue of THE OSCHOLARS, examining the fashion – and anti-fashion – of the Fin de Siècle period, especially as it pertains to Oscar Wilde’s works and philosophy.

I hope to bring you reviews of many of the recent and current books on the subject of late 19th century clothing, as well as scholarly papers on both fashion and anti-fashion, the latter especially as put forward by both the proponents of dress reform and the artistic and Bohemian communities.

Oscar himself was much in favour of dress reform, and his wife Constance, through his influence initially, was a vocal member of the Rational Dress Society, and wrote several articles on the subject. Many other thinkers and artists of the day championed this new style of dress, even as it was vilified in such magazines as Punch, and deplored by fashionable society.

I will also hope to gather, where possible, reviews and articles on pertinent exhibitions of costume as I am made aware of them – and assuming that I can either attend them myself or delegate it to someone in that area.

A LIST OF RECOMMENDED SITES FOR

THE STUDY OF VICTORIAN FASHION AND ANTI-FASHION

During the course of my own research into Victorian costume, first for my thesis and now just for the love of it, I have run across many useful and informative sites, and some rather less helpful ones. So I thought I would make a list of those sites that I have come across, so far, that have been of the best use to me and which I feel I can recommend to other scholars of Victorian fashion and anti-fashion, and of Victorian history and literature in general.

http://www.corsetsandcrinolines.com/

A site which sells vintage clothing, including Victorian and Edwardian pieces. I have not ordered from them, so I don’t know how reliable or legitimate their pieces might be. But if nothing else, it does show the range of Victorian clothing that is out there for sale. Also many of the pieces are displayed in multiple pictures, depicting their construction and ornamental details, which is an aid to those who are studying actual costume construction.

http://content.lib.washington.edu/costumehistweb/index.html

A wonderful online collection of images from a collection put together by the costume historian and designer Blanche Payne, a professor at the University of Washington. The fashion plates in the collection cover the period from 1806-1915, and are both in color and black and white. Absolutely invaluable for scholars wishing to know exactly what the latest fashions for these years would be.

http://www.meg-andrews.com/

Ms. Andrews’ site sells antique costumes and textiles, and again I cannot vouch for the site, but the photos of her objects for sale are beautiful and, in some cases, quite detailed and enlargeable, which make them, again, a wonderful source for researchers. Her pieces are quite beautiful and I would recommend going there simply for the sheer aesthetic appreciation that the site affords.

http://costume.osu.edu/Reforming_Fashion/reformdress.htm

One of the few actual exhibitions that has been done on this subject. Sadly I did not see it in person, but the online exhibition is just as good. The exhibition covers both the Victorian fashion that the reformers were seeking to transform and the resulting garments and undergarments. From one of their photos of a reform corset, a very talented seamstress friend of mine managed to create a wearable reproduction of it for my thesis project. A wonderful online resource of both information and images about this important 19th century movement, so dear to the hearts of Oscar Wilde and Walter Crane, etc. There are also examples of artistic dress from England and Europe as well as from America. A site well worth spending some time reading and examining.

http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/rodrigues.htm#46

An interesting online article on ‘Rational Dress’ vs. fashionable dress and the attitudes of both feminists and anti-feminists to both styles of dress. The article does not mention artistic dress, confining itself mostly to the ‘ugly’ bloomers and woolen undergarments and reform corsets contrasted with the restricting corsets and bustles of the fashionable ladies. The historical background that Ms. Rodrigues gives is informative and well-footnoted. There are no illustrations to the article, which is a tiny drawback for those unfamiliar with some of the reform garments mentioned, but the text strives to describe the costumes in enough detail to give an adequate idea of the clothing.

http://www.fathom.com/seminars/21701726/

An excellent online seminar in five sessions on the development of the corset and the crinoline in the 19th and 20th centuries. Two eminent costume historians, Suzanne Lussier and Lucy Johnston, take the reader through from the beginning of Victoria’s reign through to the age of Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier. They are very sensible in their approach to the subject matter, debunking many of the horror-stories, while not denying that there were some misuses of the garments that led to the stories in the first place. Well-illustrated and very informative. They do not dwell much on the reform movements or garments, preferring to concentrate on the fashionable garments which they had more access to at the Victoria and Albert museum costume collection, of which Ms. Johnston is a curator. All in all, I recommend this as a precise and well-written introduction to the subject.

http://www.victoriana.com/

‘The Victorian Era Online’. This is rather a catch-all site for a number of different Victorian subjects, but they do have a whole page of links on Victorian fashion, some useful, some not. Still, a fun site to poke around on.

And to finish, a couple of recommendations for general costume sites:

http://milieux.com/costume/

A large site mostly of links to other sites, but an excellent compilation of resources for all periods of costume.

http://www.costumes.org/index.html

Tara McGinnes’ excellent and immensely copious collection of links and pages on all manner of costumes, and on design and construction, as well as purchasing and patterns. This is my main source of costume knowledge on the net. She updates the site fairly regularly and most of the links work. There is a page for every period of history you can think of, and every nation. Some pages are more comprehensive than others, but she does her best, either with links or articles or images. My only tiny problem with the site is that it’s a little too busy, too many ads and images on sidebars to distract from what you’re trying to find. But that’s a small price to pay for such a fabulous reference site.

So that is my list, to this date. I’m sure I have missed out on many wonderful sites, and if indeed anyone has sites to recommend to me, I would love to hear about them.

Meanwhile, I encourage you to visit the sites I mentioned above and hopefully, I will be able to post another list in the future with still more sites.

VIII. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH

Oliver Parker is due to begin filming of The Picture of Dorian Gray at the end of this month, July 2008.

Posters

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.  This can be found by clicking the icon.

This month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin. 

Trader Faulkner: Peter Finch – A Biography. London: Angus & Robertson 1979

p.209] ‘In April 1960 work began on Oscar Wilde. Yvonne Mitchell, who played Oscar’s wife . . . remembers the sudden change in Peter as the part took him over. “On the first two days of filming there was this acquaintance I had known for a number of years as Peter Finch. On the third day, there arrived a man I didn’t know, with heavy eye-lids, and a droopy sort of face, who was Oscar Wilde, and he remained Oscar Wilde from then onwards.

‘“Apparently, he used to sit on Yolande’s bed at night, reading poetry and weeping. He turned into a totally different man...”

‘Oscar Wilde was an extremely difficult part to cast because the producers had to find a star of reasonable magnitude as a box office draw, who could look graceful and æsthetic, but not overtly effeminate or camp. Wilde had a beautiful voice and, according to those who remembered him, had the manner and presence of a theatrical actor of his time . . .

‘Ken Hughes and Peter Finch, as director and star . . . would be a most unlikely choice unless you knew the capabilities of both men. Hughes, a voluble Cockney, and Finchie took to one another like the Corsican Brothers. Ken Hughes is lucid, intuitive, a marvellous writer with absolutely no intellectual pretensions. “Finchie and I were on the same non-intellectualising vibe,” said Ken Hughes. “What I felt about Finch was that he would level out any suggestion of the camp faggot because he was basically heterosexual. We do know that Wilde was poetic, a man of great sensitivity, but I must say Finchie surprised me. His performance was more thoughtful, delicate and considered and more Wildean than I ever felt Finchie was capable of producing.”

‘As for the swollen hands Peter seemed to acquire during filming, Ken Hughes felt they were not caused by the power of thought but by copious bottles of champagne and a surfeit of potatoes . . . He was becoming visibly more bloated in appearance as time went on. “Peter did all he could to get under the skin of his role. He’d wear his Victorian suit around the house to gllen cast the film. “The ’phone rang. It was Irving to know if I could leave the typewriter for an hour to go round and meet Peter Finch. I sat opposite Finch, who was absolutely charming, but I thought, this Finchie Aussie bushranger to play Oscar Wilde? No way, I thought, who’s kidding whom? But as far as Irving was concerned it was a fait accompli. He had made up his mind. He had the marvellous native tough Hollywood cunning of the 1940s. Morley on the Goldstein film was probably closer in appearance and a much more obvious choice for the rôle than Finch, added to which Morley had already played Wilde in the theatre. I feel that we were lucky in that the chemistry by a fluke was right with Finch, and with John Fraser as Bosie. It just seemed to work, and you can’t analyse that process. We shot in colour, which helped.”

p.211] ‘Finch, as Wilde, turned out to be one of the subtlest decisions any casting producer could have made.

‘With both Oscar Wilde films shooting in the studios, the producers were racing to beat the clock to the finishing post to be the first out for distribution. Warwick Films, with Peter as their golden hope, had four spies on the other picture, four crowd extras who were on the other film but in Warwick’s pay. These four were picking up two pay cheques, one from Robert Goldstein and one from Irving Allen. They’d report to Peter’s studio as soon as they could get from one studio to the other in a fast car, bringing copies of schedules and daily papers. Peter told a hilarious story about Goldstein having hell’s own job getting hansom cabs of the period. Finchie’s company hired ever hansom in the country, parked them out on the Elstree lot and left them there. They just sat there during the whole picture and never moved. Hughes told me they also gave Goldstein trouble over costumiers. “Our deal with the London costumiers, Berman’s, was that they did not deal with Goldstein. We went to Nathan’s, the other London theatrical costumiers and set up the same deal. The opposition finally wound up advertising in The Stage with an ad, something like “Wanted, crowd artists with costumes, two guineas a day”.

‘From the day they started shooting The Trials of Oscar Wilde, to the end of the sixth week, they had a married print with the music score on it, as Ron Goodwin was actually writing the music for scenes they hadn’t even shot. He would go to Ken Hughes’ home each evening and Hughes would act out the scene as it would subsequently be shot. Goodwin would time it with a stop watch and then off he’d go and write the music. Next day Hughes would shoot the scene. It would be a few feet out here and there, but it was eventually happily “wangled” for the final print. I asked Hughes if he thought the film had artistic merit. “an artistic film? Balls! By the last day of shooting it was like the last fifteen minutes of the Grand National. We had to strike a set, union rules went buggery. Pandemonium broke out. The entire unit moved like people in a bomb scare . . “‘ [There is more of this not very interesting anecdote.]

IX. LETTER FROM IRELAND

Aoife Leahy sends us this budget of news.

Greetings from Ireland to all the Oscholars.

Oscar Wilde was a common thread in the Fifth Annual International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival’s Cultural/Educational Seminar in TCD on the 11th May. Dr Colum O’ Cleirigh (St Patrick’s College Drumcondra) spoke about Aiden Rogers, Prof Roy Sargeant (Artscape, Cape Town) gave a talk on Mary Renault and Sonja Tiernan (National Library of Ireland) discussed her research on Eva Gore-Booth. Wilde’s life and work had affected all of these figures - sometimes as an inspiration, sometimes as a cautionary tale.

Dr Eibhear Walshe (UCC), who also chaired the Cultural Event, gave a talk entitled ‘Wilde and the New Ireland’ focusing on how Wilde was perceived by Irish and Anglo-Irish people in the 1930s-1950s. Dr Walshe spoke about his forthcoming book Oscar Wilde and Ireland, in which he examines conflicting views of Wilde in Ireland over a much broader span of time. It will be of great interest to the Oscholars.

There were also short talks on diversity in the arts by Brian Merriman and Nick White. As Artistic Director of the festival, Brian Merriman joined in the questions and answers at the end and contributed some interesting observations of his own on Wilde’s Irishness and attraction to Catholicism. He also commented that the festival’s poster and internet campaign depicting Wilde with a green carnation in his mouth had been a hit.

The Theatre Festival was a great success and the plays on offer were very well attended. At the short plays programme ‘Short Shorts and Very Shorts’ on a sunny Friday evening, for example, extra chairs had to be brought into the lovely Georgian setting of The Cobalt Café so that nobody was sent away disappointed.

‘Wilde – The Restaurant’ recently opened in The Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street. Since there are various restaurants named after Wilde all over the world (there is one in Brisbane, Australia, for instance), it seems appropriate to have one in the heart of Dublin. Meals are created by chef John Wood and the restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The restaurant serves locally sourced, in-season produce. The full menu can be found by clicking the logo.

‘Wilde – The Restaurant’ recently opened in The Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street. Since there are various restaurants named after Wilde all over the world (there is one in Brisbane, Australia, for instance), it seems appropriate to have one in the heart of Dublin. Meals are created by chef John Wood and the restaurant is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The restaurant serves locally sourced, in-season produce. The full menu can be found by clicking the logo.

Dublin poet Pat Shortall was so pleased to be mentioned on Oscholars in May that he has kindly agreed to reproduce the full text of his poem ‘Wilde Tribute Poem – Prison Number C.3.3.’ for us. Shortall’s recently released collection Bramble Lane is available on CD (ring 087-2393062 to order), but this written version with the poet’s own punctuation and layout of the ‘Wilde Tribute Poem’ is exclusive to the Oscholars. Deliberately unglamorous and down to earth phrases like ‘you do your time’ and ‘there is no bail’ convey the sense of sympathy and solidarity that today’s Dubliners have for the ‘poor old soul’ Wilde. (See above).

In an inventive marketing move, The Abbey Theatre has included Neil Bartlett’s forthcoming production of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband as part of its ‘Season of Love.’ An Ideal Husband itself will run from 14th August to 27th September, with previews on the 11th, 12th and 13th of August. Other plays in the season include Brian Friel’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. There is a discount for booking tickets in advance for three or four of the ‘Season of Love’ plays. Details can be found on www.abbeytheatre.ie/whatson/overview2008.html.

Neil Bartlett arrived in Ireland for rehearsals on 7th July, and as part of his very busy schedule, he graciously answered some questions put by Aoife Leahy on the forthcoming production for THE OSCHOLARS.

Q. As you begin rehearsals for An Ideal Husband in The Abbey this week, do you have any hints of what we should expect to see in the new production (14th August – 27th September with previews 11th–13th August)?

A. Of course, I don’t want to give too much away, but….. the ‘Society’ plays of Wilde are often thought of as epitomising a certain kind of well-upholstered, convention-driven late nineteenth century theatrical heritage product. In fact, the play is subtitled ‘A New and Original Play of Modern Life’, and it was written in a year when Wilde was restlessly experimenting with new ways to express both the increasing turbulence of his private life and his dissatisfaction with conservative London culture. It was written in the same year as La Sainte Courtisane and The Florentine Tragedy, two failed experiments in treating An Ideal Husband’s primary themes of dysfunctional marriage and prostitution, and it comes just before The Importance of Being Earnest – which is probably the most formally experimental London play of its century. We’re playing it in period, but trying to keep it as odd, as questioning, as uncomfortable as Wilde’s letters tell us he found it to write.

Q. Is there a particular resonance to staging a Wilde play in Dublin? In recent years, Wilde productions have been very popular and well attended here.

A. Of course, as an Englishman, I am slightly apprehensive about creating the first ever staging of this play at Ireland’s National Theatre. I just have to remind myself that the play is not only about outsiders – all the principal characters feel themselves at odds with the city they live in – but written by a man who revelled in that role.

Q. Your book Who Was That Man: A Present for Mr Wilde looks at scandals – including significant gay histories before and after Wilde - that have been forgotten or sidelined. The threat of scandal drives the plot of An Ideal Husband and ultimately good things result from the crisis. Is it an inherently political play?

A. Hmmmn, not sure about those ‘good things’- of all Wilde’s ‘happy endings’, the ending of Act Four of this pay strikes me as being one of the most queasily double-sided. Of course, in a simple way, the play is political, even topical – I understand that the notion of a senior Government figure being caught out over some shady financial transactions is not entirely unheard of in Dublin.

The entire plot hinges on the question of whether a corrupt politician should resign or not, so in that simple sense it is political – thrillingly so…but it is also political in another and perhaps more interesting sense of the word. It struggles to connect ideas of personal freedom (and personal guilt and shame) with larger, social ideas, particularly in the realm of sexual relations and of marriage. In his own inimitably contradictory and lurid way, Wilde is toying with ideas that were rising to the surface of his century – in the writings of Symonds, of Carpenter and of Shaw, for instance, all in the same decade – and giving them an absolutely personal shape. For obvious reasons, he was obsessed with the idea of whether personally freedom could ever be found within a conventional social structure, or whether some more radical shift of values was the only possible source of salvation….

Q. You are collaborating with set and costume designer Rae Smith on the production. Is it important to get the right look and space for a Wilde play?

A. Absolutely fundamental; this is my eleventh collaboration with Rae Smith, and artistically the show is as much hers as mine. The most important thing is to get rid of all notions of decorative décor and concentrate on telling the story, which is a dramatic and dramatically unpleasant one. She has taken all of the conventions – the furniture, the period costumes, even the ideas of act-drop and scene-change – and made them active ingredients rather than simply givens. Wilde uses three very different spaces in this story, and Rae is very good in honing in on what is important about a space from the point of view of fundamental narrative. For instance, the point about the opening scene in Grosvenor Square is that the Chiltern’s home is not stable, secure and luxurious, but built on sand; the point about Lady Chiltern’s morning room in Act 2 is that it is a feminine and self-consciously conservative environment, in which the most vicious marital row in Wilde’s entire canon is spoken (my god, imagine how Constance must have felt watching that scene on the opening night!!!) whereas Lord Goring’s bachelor pad in Act 3 is masculine and self-consciously radical….all sounds a bit abstract, but it all comes down to being bold with colour, light and space. You’ll see!

Q. What do you think of the relatively new Oscar Wilde statue on Merrion Square (sculpted by Danny Osborne and unveiled in 1997)? Although Wilde lived in Merrion Square until 1876, Osborne interestingly portrays him at a later stage in his life.

A. I have tried to love it, I really have, but I’m sorry; I think the whole idea of a statue to someone as elusive and unstable and dangerous as Wilde is a bit of a non-starter. He is many things, but monumental is not one of them. Maggi Hambling’s memorial in London faced the same problem – and addressed it by making a sort of anti-monument. With some success; the last time I passed it, it was being sat on by three young and completely filthy construction workers, using it to have a quick fag in their tea-break while working on the restoration of St Martin’s church next door, and the sound of Wilde spinning in his grave (with pleasure, of course) was actually audible all the way from Paris…..

Q. Any other thoughts or comments?

A. I look forward to seeing you at the show!

Many thanks from The Oscholars!

Aoife Leahy

X. 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; to reach it, please click .  We hope these Calls may attract Wildëans.

‘British Æstheticisms’ are the subject of a conference being organised by Bénédicte Coste and Cathérine Delyfer at the University of Montpellier in October 2009. The Call for Papers is published in English and French at www.esthetismes.com. Deadline December. This would appear to offer a wonderful chance of a gathering of fin-de-siéclistes in the celebrated university town in the south of France.

‘Urban and Rural Landscapes: Language, Literature, and Culture in Modern Ireland’, DUCIS, Dalarna University, Sweden, 6th-7th November 2008. Throughout the twentieth-century Ireland has seen its rural and urban landscapes constantly under change. For centuries, rural Ireland had been central to the socio-politics of the island, but in the post-Second World War years there has been a "widespread rejection of rural life" (Brown 2004: 199) with the rural population migrating abroad or to the urban centres in the island. The aim of this conference is to analyse how these changes have been reflected in literature, culture, and language from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. Papers are welcome from a broad range of disciplines including: Literary Studies; Ecocriticism; Media and Film Studies; Cultural Studies and Popular Culture; Postcolonial Studies; Gender Studies; Critical Theory; Linguistics Studies. Possible topics include Pastoral nostalgia, fairy tale and folklore collecting and re-writing, especially the works of Oscar Wilde, Lady Wilde and Sir William Wilde, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by email to Irene Gilsenan Nordin and to Carmen Zamorano Llena (ign@du.se). Abstracts dealing with language/linguistics should be sent to Una Cunningham (uca@du.se), while abstracts dealing with nineteenth-century subjects and authors should be sent to Florina Tufescu-Fransson ftf@du.se. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st September 2008. Selected papers will be published in book form and in the Nordic Irish Studies journal

XI.  OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE

Following in the footsteps of ‘Speranza’, the ‘Wilde Oscars’ and other pop music bands, ‘Dorian Gray’ has a small but Wilde-laden presence on the internet at http://www.doriangrayland.com/. We thank Tiffany Perala for this discovery.

The great progenitors of the incorporation of Oscar Wilde into world of pop music were surely the Rolling Stones, with their song ‘We Love You’. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote this after they were arrested along with Brian Jones on drug charges stemming from a raid on Richards’s house, Redlands, on 12th February 1967. This was a thank you message to the fans who supported Jagger and Richards through their arrest. The Stones made a promotional film for this song that was banned by the BBC but shown elsewhere. It was directed by Peter Whitehead and based on The Trials Of Oscar Wilde with Mick Jagger as Oscar, Keith Richards as the Marquis and Marianne Faithfull as Bosie.

XII. OSCAR WILDE: THE VIDEO

Our video this month is The Canterville Ghost, from a version performed by children.

XIII. 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'.  New websites continue to be reviewed here, after which they are filed on the Trafficking for Strange Webs page, which was last updated in May 2008. A Table of Contents was added for ease of access. ‘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.  To see ‘Liens’, click here. To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click  .

We recommend a visit to http://www.dandyism.net/. This represents a serious attempt to get to grips with dandyism, and it is constantly changing.

http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Oscar_Wilde/ is yet another list of phrases taken from Wilde without sourcing them.

http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/ is a serious attempt to present the works of Oscar Wilde to what we guess must be American schoolchildren, who use a forum to ask questions about Wilde. Perhaps rather unfairly, here are extracts from two of them: ‘Hi! I'm reading Oscar Wilde's biography in the introduction of the book "The Importance of Being Earnest." and I came across the history of this play, Salome. It stated that Salome performed the sensuous "Dance of the Seven Veils" and I found this quite similar with the dance that Rebecca Sharp performed with some veiled women in the Vanity Fair movie (starring Reese Witherspoon) I have yet to read the book by Thackeray so I can't confirm if The Dance of the Seven Veils was indeed taken from Wilde's Salome. If anyone could shed light, it would be most welcome.’ ‘Hi, Am thinking about getting into some of Oscar Wilde's novels, anyone have any recommendations of which i should start with?’

Daniel Colegate, a third year PhD Student at the University of Durham has launched a website, www.graduatejunction.com, designed to help graduate researchers make contact with other researchers interested in their work.  ‘The idea is to connect people who would otherwise not be aware of each other, perhaps in different groups, departments, institutions or countries.  Increasing communication can prevent duplication of effort and help the spread of new ideas, benefiting the entire research community.’ Mr Colegate believes that Graduate Junction could benefit a lot of graduate researchers, and so do we.

XIV. OGRAPHIES

We have recently been expanding our sections of BIBLIOGRAPHIES, DISCOGRAPHIES and SCENOGRAPHIES and this will be a major component of our work from now on. Click the appropriate icons.

XV. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

Readers accustomed to checking here for news of the Wilde Societies are advised that these now have their own page. To reach it, please click

XVI. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS

All our journals appear on our website www.oscholars.com. 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

Work goes ahead for the second issue of this journal of Ruskin studies on our website, under the vigorous editorship of Anuradha Chatterjee (University of South Australia) and Carmen Casaliggi (University of Limerick). Dr Chatterjee has produced a splendid first issue, and issued a Call for Papers for the second. THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day will shed much light in new places, and places Ruskin studies firmly in conjugation with Wilde studies.

Rue des Beaux Arts

The fifteenth issue of our French language journal under the dedicated editorship of Danielle Guérin will be published before the end of July. 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 (co-edited by Barbara Pfeifer), George Moore (edited by Mark Llewellyn) and Vernon Lee (edited by Sophie Geoffroy) are planned for this autumn.

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 section called VISIONS. This was consolidated in the summer, and a new edition is planned for the autumn. Subsequently we will be calling for papers. VISIONS is co-edited by Isa Bickman, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Nicola Gauld and Sarah Turner. NOCTURNE, our journal devoted to Whistler and his circle, remains in abeyance for the time being.

The Latchkey

In September /October we will launch THE LATCHKEY, a journal devoted to reporting and creating scholarship on The New Woman. The co-editors are Jessica Cox, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sophie Geoffroy, Lisa Hager, Christine Huguet, and Alison Laurie.

XVII. Acknowledgements

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.

Melmoth

A Digest of the Victorian Gothic and Decadent Literature, edited for THE OSCHOLARS by Sondeep Kandola (University of Leeds).

[We incorporate this first digest into our Editorial page, in the expectation that for the second issue it will move to its own page within www.oscholars.com, to be linked from here or reached from the drop-down menu – Ed. THE OSCHOLARS]

Reviews:

Glennis Byron on Bram Stoker, a Literary Life by Lisa Hopkins

John Plunkett on Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (eds.) Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis

Ruth Robbins on The Routledge Companion to the Gothic (eds.) Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy and Gothic Literature by Andrew Smith

Andrew Tate on Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture by Patrick R. O’Malley

Calls for Papers: Decadence at the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle

Gothic Excess

Transatlantic Decadence

Realism and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century

Phobia: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

Abstracts

Nick Freeman on Arthur Machen

Minna Vuohelainen on Richard Marsh

Emily Alder on Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson

REVIEWS:

Review by Glennis Byron

Lisa Hopkins, Bram Stoker: A Literary Life .Palgrave, 2007. ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-4647 (Hb). 173pp.

While Stoker is remembered for one book when he wrote seventeen others, Lisa Hopkins argues in her introduction to Bram Stoker: A Literary Life, ‘there is a sense in which he wrote Dracula many times over and called it a variety of things’ (1). The rest of the introduction may have the unfortunate effect of alienating many readers, as the numerous lists and descriptions of various connections between Stoker’s works are rather overdone, and one waits in some frustration for the arguments and analysis to begin. However, for those who persist, this book has much to offer. Hopkins has certainly found an impressive number of similarities between Stoker’s fictional works, and, focusing on a number of key issues, ultimately provides a far more detailed and convincing exploration of the relationship of the author’s work to his life than many conventional biographies of Stoker have offered.

The following four chapters focus on the impact on Stoker’s work of, respectively, his early life in Dublin; his connection with Henry Irving; England, Englishness and Irishness; and his travels. The primary focus of the discussion of his early life is Stoker’s relationships with women, and there is a particularly impressive analysis of monstrous motherhood as portrayed in Stoker’s short story, ‘The Squaw’. I nevertheless felt uneasy at times at the way some old stereotypes about the Victorians, women and sexuality seem to be re-invoked. In her discussion of motherhood in Stoker’s work, for example, Hopkins observes that ‘despite Victorian doctors’ protestations that good women felt no sexual desire, the fear at the heart of Stoker’s novels is that motherhood is inevitably a sign of sensuality’ (29). Here Acton’s notorious statement about the majority of women feeling no sexual desire seems to be taken as representative of Victorian medical opinion, a position that by now, one might have thought, had been well and truly discounted.

The link between women and monstrosity is a concern which runs throughout the book, coming back to particular prominence in the first part of chapter five, ‘The Cave’. Here Hopkins identifies the centrality of dark subterranean places to Stoker’s fiction, and explores its darker side, its obsessions with sex, gender, disease, and secrets, ultimately arguing that in writing his fiction, Stoker was writing his own literary life. This final chapter is perhaps the most interesting and original in terms of analysis, and Hopkins’s reading of the cave motifs in The Mystery of the Sea is especially illuminating. And while some of the evidence offered as suggestive of Stoker’s Masonic connections is perhaps a touch strained, Hopkins convinces that it is nevertheless an issue well worth further consideration.

Many of the general points raised are not necessarily new – Stoker’s association of the mother figure with monstrosity, for example, has been a topic of interest for Stoker scholars since Phyllis Roth’s 1977 article, ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’. However, what Hopkins achieves is to demonstrate how consistently a series of particular concerns emerge across the spectrum of Stoker’s fiction, and to posit possible reasons for this through returning to Stoker’s life. Hopkins will certainly encourage us to return, with fresh eyes, to Stoker’s enduring vampire tale, and inspire those readers familiar only with Dracula to explore Stoker’s fiction much further.

Glennis Byron, University of Stirling

Review by John Plunkett

Alexandra Warwick and Martin Willis, eds. Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007), pp. 251.

The fascination with the Whitechapel murders of 1888, and in particular the impulse to identify the murderer, has not lessened with the passage of time (Patricia Cornwell’s unlikely trumpeting of Walter Sickert is only the most recent example of the obsession the case can arouse). Yet, whereas contemporary identifications tend towards individuals who are familiar in the sense of being distinguished, the long cast of original suspects was familiar in a different sense, that of exemplifying late-Victorian fears and anxieties. Despite his extreme physical violence, Jack the Ripper was conjured out of a corporeal absence, an otherness that was populated by a number of overdetermined identities. The Jack the Ripper that emerges from this anthology of fourteen critical essays is an oddly empty, fiduciary figure, who, from his grisly inception, was mythologized, demonized, and endlessly remediated by newspapers, fiction and cinema.

The editors and contributors are understandably keen to contrast their approach with the amateur Ripperologists whose continuing fixation is to uncover the real identity of the murderer. The book’s aim is rather to investigate the ‘broader contexts of the murders and of the uses and significance of the figure of Jack the Ripper in wider culture.’(4) The result is a well-organised and interesting anthology whose value stems from the way that the extracts use the case to illuminate numerous aspects of fin-de-siècle culture. The anthology comprises ten already published pieces on the Whitechapel murders, of which probably the most well known is that by Judith Walkowitz, supplemented by four commissioned essays.

Alex Warwick and Martin Willis usefully divide the book into three sections – Media, Culture, History – in order to reflect the different disciplinary areas that have explored the ramifications of the Ripper case. There are some inevitable overlaps between the pieces though. The impact of the New Journalism and the agency of the popular press, for example, is specifically addressed by Christopher Frayling, Darren Oldridge and L. Perry Curtis, but is mentioned by most essays. The demonstration of the way that Jack the Ripper was remediated from his very beginning is furthered by the pieces of Gary Coville and Patrick Luciano, who analyse the filmic reworking of Jack the Ripper in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, and by Warwick, who discusses its resurfacing in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and the graphic novel, From Hell (1998-9). Indeed, the dark literary shadow cast by Jack the Ripper seems surprisingly long in that other pieces trace his influence upon Sherlock Holmes (Martin Willis), Dracula (Nicholas Rance), and the history of popular crime fiction (Clive Bloom).

The second key aspect the anthology explores is the way that the media attention the murders received constellated, and amplified, less edifying aspects of the popular imagination. Fears concerning prostitutes and female sexuality, the East End, and racial otherness, all came to the fore. Walkowitz thus argues that the Ripper helped to ‘established a common vocabulary and iconography for the forms of male violence that permeated the entire society’ (184), while Sander Gilman similarly explores Jack’s portrayal as the ‘sign of deviant sexuality destroying life’ (216), and its linked to assumptions that he was an Eastern Jew. Finally, Robert F. Haggard contrasts the reactions to Jack the Ripper from affluent Londoners with those actually living in the East End, in order to reveal the prejudices of the former towards the inhabitants of ‘outcast London’. The value of this anthology lies in its ability to address the multiple figures of Jack of Ripper, opening out the role of the case in contributing to many broader late-Victorian issues, rather than seeking to close it down by ascribing identity.

John Plunkett, University of Exeter

Review by Ruth Robbins

The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, eds Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, London: Routledge, 2007, ISBN 9780415898435, 290pp.

Gothic Literature, Andrew Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh Guides to Literature), 2007, ISBN 9780748623709, 201 pp.

The Gothic gets everywhere. It’s a term that defies definition, refuses limits, and, like a Gothic monster, will not be pinned down, oozing and seeping into spaces one thought were safe. It is, as Andrew Smith reminds his readers, ‘different things in different contexts’ (2). It can be used as a technical specification for particular forms of architectural flourishes; it names an ancient Germanic tribe; it stands for the literature of excess that flourished in the eighteenth century and beyond as a reaction against the coldness of Enlightenment rationalism, the dark twin of that other anti-rationalist reaction, sentiment. Beyond the eighteenth century, it moved from the sublime landscape and medieval castles, abbeys and ruins in Catholic Europe, which popularized the genre known as the Gothic novel to the cityscapes of the protestant north: it can be found in the Victorian canon, from Dickens as Alexandra Warwick suggests in her essay in the Routledge Companion to Eliot, in that most realist of realist novels, Middlemarch, where both Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s marriages are figured as Gothic entrapments – the virgin imprisoned in her husband’s dry-as-dust vicarage/castle, the doctor whose wife flourishes on dead men’s brains – all of which happens just round the corner in a middling town in middle-class Middle England. It has spread, like a virus, Spooner and McEvoy’s collection shows, through the various spaces of empire, oscillating between sublime wilderness encounters with the Other and historically constructed terrors such as slavery (in American versions) and transportation (one of the Gothic legacies of Australia). In the twentieth century it has found its way into film, television, the internet and subcultures. If the writers discussed here are to be believed (and I think they are) it is the cultural expression of desire, a description of circulation of capital, and an evocation of the distrust of racial, sexual and economic difference: the Gothic, argues Teresa Goddu, is haunted by history, and collapses economics (houses, property, slaves) and desire into the single double word: possession. Its metamorphic capacity ought to be as terrifying as the predations of Schedoni, or the monstrosity of Frankenstein’s monster, or the bloodsucking of Dracula, or the predatory violence of that contemporary bogeyman, the serial killer. From The Italian to The Silence of the Lambs: the Gothic contains – and fails to contain – them all.

This is both the problem and the pleasure of the Gothic. Just when you thought it was safe to say you’d got what it is, another version, another landscape, another atmosphere is co-opted to the genre or mode of Gothic. This is a problem because if the Gothic really is everywhere, then studying it might just be futile: Gothic risks becoming just another name for literary, cultural or film studies – it is a whole way of life. It is a pleasure for all sorts of reasons, from the pleasures of aesthetic transgression (it is an excessive mode, after all, and breaks bounds all the time) to the fun of spotting and analysing the motifs and tropes in their multiple forms and locations, and finding family resemblances in unlikely places: doubles and dark twins indeed.

The potentially oxymoronic phrase ‘a companion to the Gothic’ (Gothic pleasure and terror are surely most usually solitary experiences for both victims and audiences) is almost as ubiquitous as the Gothic itself: I have in my possession three such companions of which Spooner and McEvoy’s is the most recent, following in the venerable footsteps of David Punter’s A Companion to the Gothic (Blackwell, 2000) and Jerrold Hogle’s Cambridge Companion to the Gothic (2002). Spooner and McEvoy’s collection goes further than its predecessors in broadening the Gothic territory, both literally (it has a much broader geographical sweep) and metaphorically (it moves into territories more closely aligned with cultural studies agendas such as popular and pornographic film, television studies, Goth subcultures and the internet). It offers a guide to some of the familiar spaces – the origins of Gothic in eighteenth-century literature and the varieties of Victorian Gothic in essays by Robert Miles and Alexandra Warwick; it also moves into the twentieth century, with Catherine Spooner’s discussion of relationships between Gothic and modernist/postmodernist traditions. It also discusses and analyses some key Gothic concepts which help to organize our sense of how the Gothic works: these include David Punter on the uncanny, an essay which moves beyond the Freudian readings of the concept to considerations of being ‘displaced’ or not ‘at home’ in language, as well as a consideration of monumentalization and celebrity as uncanny manifestations, before returning to the key question of the uncanny as the link between premonition and its fulfilment. Kelly Hurley’s essay on the abject and grotesque as figures of the Gothic extends – as it quite rightly should – the reach of the uncanny. Andrew Smith on haunting offers a useful addition, for the ghost story in particular is too often underplayed in Gothic criticism and theory. There are also helpful considerations of gender, sexuality (queer readings and writings of the Gothic), and of children as significant figures for the Gothic. All of those essays are fascinating and well conceived – it’s worth reading them for the new map of the old terrain.

But what makes the volume distinctive is the less familiar (at least to me) spaces of the Gothic. Thus the move to different locations – to Scotland, Ireland, the empire more generally, and Canada and Australia – opens up new vistas and new national traditions for the Gothic. For all that, there are a series of resemblances between these various types and spaces of the Gothic, which are picked up in different ways through the volume. Rule-breaking is one element that Miles picks up in his essay on eighteenth-century Gothic where he discusses Walpole’s defence of Shakespeare’s rule-breaking against the French tradition of the classical unities and suggests that generic instability is a Gothic characteristic. Alexandra Warwick argues that alongside the new locations of the Gothic in Victorian writing (the city, the domestic space), a concern with the will to ‘articulate and analyse excess’ which characterizes the writings of Sigmund Freud is a specifically Victorian concern of the Gothic more generally. And as Ellis Hanson notes in his discussion of Queer Gothic, the mode and its criticism tends to slide between psychologizing and historicizing – between the going beyond legitimate objects and acts of desire and the laws of narrative history. Transgressive moments in plot, transgressive activities by characters, generic over-spilling of containing lines are all shown to be major issues in Gothic manifestations. That national boundaries and limits play such a large part in this collection, and that the essays show the continuities with the eighteenth-century European ‘originals’ of Gothic as well as the specificities of those distinctive national traditions, is a major strength of the collection.

Towards the end, the volume turns to the new and not-so-new media, and to the Goth subculture. This is also new territory, though in a slightly different way. What the essays show is the liveliness of the Gothic mode: its polymorphous existences, its apparently endless adaptability. Benjamin Hervey’s essay on contemporary horror movies makes the case, for example, that recent Gothic movies push the mode further than earlier versions by the twinned approach of evincing a cynicism about rationality’s capacity to exorcise the monster, and, paradoxically perhaps, but the use of sensory deprivation to place the audience in the same position of unknowing as the victim/protagonist, rendering that audience much more unsettled than earlier versions might have made it. And the essays – particularly those which demonstrate Gothic’s persistence through popular forms like television series (The X Files – perhaps more usually associated with science fiction, but which draws on Gothic practices), and into ‘everyday life’ in Goth subculture, show both that the monsters that haunt us, and the pleasure we take in them, are both alive and well: something, indeed, has survived, and it can still make us jump.

Andrew Smith’s volume in the Edinburgh Guides series is a companion of a rather more reassuring kind. In their introduction, Spooner and McEvoy state that their ‘organizational principle has been to foreground approaches to Gothic rather than ways of defining it’. Because most of their contributors are of the view that the Gothic defies defining limitations, they look to ways of seeing the Gothic rather than ways of pinning it down. The essays they offer are ‘bite-sized’; initial ‘tasters’ to ‘whet readers’ appetites’, which is both a strength and an occasional frustration in reading the volume for often one wants to know more. Smith’s volume, in contrast, has a different mode of address because it envisages a rather different audience, one of undergraduate students rather than those a bit further on in their explorations of the field. Although he is very careful to establish that his version of the Gothic is just one version amongst many possibilities, he nonetheless is happy enough to produce a map of the terrain which does set limits – his audience needs these boundaries because they are seeking a knowledge that is going to be tested in university assessments: for them there needs to be a set of answers rather than a set of possibilities.

Within that publisher-defined limitation, Gothic Literature is a strong example of the pedagogic text. It gives lucid explanations and extended examples, both from texts that ‘everyone does’ (Dracula and Frankenstein, since a book of this kind must talk about the books that students actually read as part of the curriculum), and from ones that we don’t all know already. There is, perhaps, a certain dialogue between the two volumes – Smith is a contributor to Spooner and McEvoy, and his essay on ‘Hauntings’ reprises in more detail some of the arguments he makes about ghost stories in Gothic Literature. What he also offers are summaries of his own case in single sentence bullet points (a feature of the Edinburgh Critical Guides series) alongside questions to further seminar discussions. The idea seems to be that students will read this text alongside their discussions of primary materials on Gothic modules in class – and this could be a very good idea if one really believed that students would always do both elements – primary reading and secondary back up. My cynicism, however, should not undermine the idealism of the project. There are good reasons for getting readers to think through what they have read; and though I think that producing their own summaries would be more useful in teaching terms than ones supplied by the author, the way they are set out, almost as the kinds of question one would set as assignment or exam tasks, does permit the space for discussion to be developed in the classroom.

In short, both books are very good of their kind, though the ‘kinds’ are clearly different. Their different audiences will find both useful. The novice should start with Smith and work up to Spooner and McEvoy. The experienced Gothic reader will find the latter a good place to extend their range.

Ruth Robbins, Leeds Metropolitan University

Review by Andrew Tate

Patrick R. O’Malley: Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 279 pp + x

‘Why does the Gothic seem to come back to life exactly at a time when its epitaph is being composed?’ asks Patrick R. O’Malley in this vibrant and intellectually daring study (12). Indeed, figurative obituaries for the literature of horror and terror might have been composed many times since the early nineteenth century, only to be discredited by ghostly returns in the work of (among others) Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker or (less obviously) Thomas Hardy, all of whom are explored in this book. The fruitful pairing of nineteenth-century literature and religion in O’Malley’s study has produced yet another resurrection for the diverse traditions of the Gothic. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture follows Ellis Hanson’s ground-breaking Decadence and Catholicism (1997) in its exploration of the relationship between ‘nonnormative’ religious and sexual modes in nineteenth-century imaginative literature. In a lucid and useful introduction, the author makes a careful distinction between what he (perhaps reluctantly) names “deviance” and the more consciously rebellious term “sexual dissidence”, freighted with its implication of agency, popularized by Jonathan Dollimore in the early 1990s (5). Rather than arguing that ‘Protestant writers and thinkers described Catholicism and various sorts of nonormative sexual activities as deviating from right practice’ – an assertion that O’Malley views as accurate but redundant – the study seeks to ‘understand how each work constructs its own set of abjected practices and sentiments’ (6).

The book begins with an intriguing reading of a piece of visual rather than literary Gothic: John Everett Millais’ Royal Academy exhibited painting, The Vale of Rest (1859) – a detail from which is deployed here as the jacket image – is read as emblematic of a peculiarly Protestant Victorian (and specifically mid-nineteenth-century) ideology that associated ‘Catholicism and sexual deviances of all kinds’ (2). The painting, featuring a grave-digging nun, appeared to connect, as O’Malley observes, ‘erotic deficiency’ and ‘erotic excess’ (2). A peculiar, paradoxical sense of unreasoned antipathy generated a vast amount of cultural production and this provides rich material for O’Malley’s argument.

A survey of early Gothic in chapter one (‘Goths and Romans: the literature of Gothic from Radcliffe to Ruskin’) identifies how the phobias of the Roman Catholic Continent were powerfully at play in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English imagination. Although dedicated scholars of the Gothic might not, perhaps, feel that the religious sensibilities of M.G. Lewis’ The Monk requires more analysis, many non-specialists will be intrigued, as I was, by the exploration of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s angry censure of this wild narrative. ‘[W]e declare it to be our opinion, that the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale,’ wrote the future co-author of Lyrical Ballads in 1797 (44). O’Malley uses this angry review as a measure of contemporary Protestant antipathy – a dislike that seems to have become visceral – for Catholic practice. Indeed, he notes that Coleridge is so appalled by Monk’s book that he ‘deplores it as an agent of the very thing it condemns: the seemingly irresistible erotics of Roman Catholicism’ (44). A shift in focus from this early mode, to the work of John Ruskin, displays the intriguing ways in which ‘Gothic rhetoric and imagery spread throughout Victorian culture’ (57). Ruskin, an articulate advocate for militant Protestantism in his early creative life, is a particularly useful figure to explore in this context since his own definition of the Gothic, advanced in The Stones of Venice (1851-3), is much richer and politically nuanced than that of many of his fellow religionists. O’Malley carefully observes that in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ – one of the most significant non-Marxist readings of labour written in the mid-nineteenth century – Ruskin initially conceptualizes ‘the Gothic as a term of alterity’ but then ‘swiftly reappropriates it as identity’ (59). Although speculation about Ruskin’s secret sympathies for Rome, which some believed would result in conversion (a belief shared, in a letter quoted here, by Millais, his former friend and romantic successor) proved inaccurate, the great critic did ultimately reach a point of imaginative reconciliation with Catholicism and its art.

Subsequent chapters explore such apparently diverse (but overlapping) territory as the rise of the Oxford Movement, the figure of Vampire and, exemplified by Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), sensation fiction. This wide survey allows O’Malley to establish the plural ways in which the Gothic became an indisputable (if controversial) facet of English aesthetic life. As he notes at the end of chapter two, again invoking Ruskin, ‘the Gothic had entered England’ (102). The final chapter (‘Conclusions: Oxford’s ghosts and the end of the Gothic’) features a sharp reading of Thomas Hardy’s bleak last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895). O’Malley traces the ways in which the mode of terror had mutated since the conceits and illusions of Ann Radcliffe’s fictions: in Hardy’s grim novel, which features infanticide and suicide, he notes, ‘the Gothic has become real’ (200). In an intriguing move, O’Malley suggests that in Jude, dominated as it is by church architecture, ‘the Gothic is part of the new, cynical, oppressive forces of modernism’ (205).

O’Malley deserves particular praise for the acuity of his theological analysis: the book displays a keen awareness of the irreducible difference of alternative religious beliefs and practices. Despite its wide literary scope, moving from the early Gothic of Radcliffe, Maturin and Lewis to the complex Protestant sensibilities of Ruskin, the nascent modernism of Hardy and the decadence of Wilde, there is little temptation to turn Christian creeds and practices into a monolithic, non-negotiable whole. Indeed, the book provides a useful companion piece to another fine Cambridge monograph, also published in 2006: Michael Wheeler’s The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture also explores the roots and representation of popular anti-Catholicism but with an emphasis on ecclesiastical practice rather than on discourses of sexuality.

This is a study ‘dedicated to the task of tracing the metaphorical gargoyles and arches that produced nineteenth-century British concepts of sexual and religious difference’ and it does so with wit, theoretical dexterity and scholarly depth (58).

Andrew Tate, University of Lancaster

CALLS FOR PAPERS:

Panel Topic: Decadence at the Transatlantic Fin de Siècle. Shifting Tides, Anxious Borders: A Graduate Conference on Nineteenth Century Transatlanticism. 1st Annual Graduate Conference of the American Studies and Victorian Studies Associations Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York November 7-8, 2008. Keynote Speaker: Leonard Tennenhouse, Brown University.

While Decadent literature has typically been viewed as a distinctly European mode that addresses the complex anxieties of degeneracy at the fin de siècle, David Weir's forthcoming book Decadent Culture in the United States makes a clear case for considering Decadence as a transatlantic conception. What congruencies exist between literatures that address the end of the American frontier and the demise of British Empire? Is there a transatlantic conversation between the aesthetic authors of continental Europe and the Americas during the 19 th century? What influence did conceptions of European Decadence have on American Decadence, and vice versa? What important distinctions can be made between transatlantic, end of the century literatures that explore fears of moral, religious, sexual, and national degeneration? This panel invites paper proposals that address these questions, or any other aspects of what we might term "Transatlantic Decadence."

Please send abstracts of 250-500 words to @ no later than 15th August 2008.

Panel Topic: Gothic Excess. 40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 26th February–1st March 2009. Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

Definitions of the Gothic are typically vague, sometimes including a vast array of literature and film and sometimes narrowly defining the Gothic as a genre bounded by time and form. They almost invariably mention some connection between the Gothic and “excess.” However, the concept of Gothic excess is under-explored and under-theorized. Explorations of excess on its own terms are scarce; instead it is taken for granted in Gothic scholarship. This panel will take excess as its topic and look more carefully at its role in the genre.

This panel would seek to explore Gothic excess in different registers: language, form, emotion, narrative, genre, etc. It would consider Gothic texts in a transatlantic Anglophone context and from the 18th century to current popular culture, exploring the similarities and differences in Gothic texts from across locations and time periods. It would consider what comprises the excess associated with the Gothic genre, and consider about what functions Gothic excess has for Gothic texts. Is excess what defines the Gothic as a genre? What, if anything, makes Gothic excess unique from other forms of excess? What impact does Gothic excess have on readers? On the reception of this sometimes-disreputable genre? On the forms of narrative used in Gothic texts? On the language used by Gothic texts? Hopefully, asking these questions about Gothic excess will allow us greater insight into the genre as a whole.

British and American Gothic texts from across all time periods will be considered. Submit abstracts to @.

Deadline: 15th September 2008

Please include with your abstract: Name and Affiliation; Email address; Postal address; Telephone number; A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee)

Panel Topic: Transatlantic Decadence. 40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 26th February–1st March 2009. Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

This panel will focus on transatlantic literature and visual culture of the “fin de siècle,” the period associated with “decadence,” and/or and the 19th-century work that set the stage for it. Discussions might ideally explore and debate transatlantic conversations, exchanges, or intellectual and cultural networks that helped to produce and disseminate “decadence” as an aesthetic and literary category. Papers would focus on nineteenth-century transatlantic literary exchanges between, say, Poe and the Pre-Raphaelites, Kate Chopin and Maupassant, Edith Wharton and Oscar Wilde. Papers will consider artists’ relationship to the end of the century, to each other, and to the culture they helped produce. Also relevant are the ways in which fin-de-siècle anxieties remain with us as we advance into the new millennium. The panel offers the opportunity to study a key movement and cultural development in a transatlantic context that not only makes British Victorian literature less “foreign” or distant, but also places it (and its interactions with American literature) in a richer cultural and historical context. We will consider how the literature and culture of the 19th century, which arguably marks the beginnings of modernism, shaped that of the 20th as well as the 21st, and we might even consider what Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker can tell us about Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Deadline: 15th September 2008.

Send abstracts and one-page CV to Emily Orlando (Fairfield University) via email or snail mail. Please include with your abstract: Name and affiliation, email address, postal address, telephone number, A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee). Emily J. Orlando, English Department, Fairfield University, 1073 N. Benson Road, Fairfield, CT 06824 @

Panel Topic: Realism and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century. 40th Anniversary Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 26th February–1st March 2009. Hyatt Regency - Boston, Massachusetts

This panel solicits papers on British and American nineteenth-century literature that problematize the realism/supernaturalism dichotomy. How is realism not just inflected and subverted but also perhaps constituted by the supernatural, paranormal, and occult? Where and when, how and why do “realism” and “supernaturalism” cease to be useful or valid designations? What theoretical frameworks might one use to reconceptualize the relationship between supernaturalism and realism?

Submit 250-500 word abstract and one-page CV to Srdjan Smajic at @. Please include with your abstract: name and affiliation, email address, postal address, telephone number, A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee). Deadline: 15th September 2008.

Phobia: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

An international conference hosted by the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science8th–9th May 2009, The ATRiuM Campus, Cardiff

Keynote Speakers: Laura Otis (Emory University) and Andrew Thacker (De Montfort University)

The history of phobias as disease entities is intimately connected to the phenomenology of modernity. Whereas the emergence of spatial phobias such as agoraphobia (Carl Otto Westphal, 1871) and claustrophobia (Benjamin Ball, 1879) coincided with growing urbanisation and the development of the modern metropolis, Sigmund Freud’s modern subject theory situated phobia at the heart of his psychoanalytical practice (‘Little Hans’, Totem and Taboo, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety). The fin de siècle was rife with cultural and social fears about the present and the future, and the twentieth century—with its two global conflicts, its natural disasters and the threat of terrorism—has ushered in a period of postmodern panic. Fear and anxiety are omnipresent in the modern age. But when, how and why does fear become chronic, morbid or abnormal? And in what ways has fear been conceptualised by medical practitioners, cultural theorists and artists?

This interdisciplinary conference looks at the different ways in which writers, artists, historians, art historians, cultural and human geographers, scientists and medical practitioners have constructed, represented and theorised phobia and chronic fear.

We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of phobias and anxiety disorders in the period from 1789 to the present. Interdisciplinary approaches are welcome. Topics may include but are not limited to:

spatial phobias

phobia and the Gothic

phobia, modernisation and modernity

Biophobias

the fin de siècle

phobia and psychoanalysis

social phobias

fear of science and technology

phobia, the senses and physical sensations

phobia and cultural geography

Phobophobia

Please send paper proposals of 300 words to Dr Vike Martina Plock and Dr Martin Willis at @ before 1st December 2008. Proposals for panels (comprising three speakers) are also welcome—please submit the title and a brief description of the panel as well as abstracts for the individual papers.

ABSTRACTS:

Victorian Feelings: BAVS Ninth Annual Conference, University of Leicester,1st-3rd September 2008

Nick Freeman (University of Loughborough): ‘A Fragment of (Spiritual) Life: Arthur Machen, Awe, and Evil’

After some years of unrewarding toil, Arthur Machen became, albeit briefly, a literary celebrity when The Great God Pan appeared in John Lane’s Keynotes series in 1894, followed by The Three Impostors the year after. As the novels were undeniably Gothic in content and published by John Lane either side of Wilde’s downfall, they have typically been read either as horror fiction or, as has been more recently the case, as another incarnation of English literary decadence. Little attention has therefore been paid to Machen’s own views of his work, particularly the ways in which he lamented Pan’s substitution of ‘evil’ for the intended ‘awe’. Machen’s twin reputations as a decadent writer who dabbled with forbidden knowledge, and a down-to earth Fleet Street journalist with a fondness for porter and steak pie, have occluded another, very different author; one whose work was deeply informed by Christian spirituality and mystical tradition.

This paper will consider some of Machen’s less familiar fiction, chiefly the vignettes, Ornaments in Jade, the novella, ‘A Fragment of Life’ and his two stories about the Holy Grail, ‘The Great Return’ and The Secret Glory in an exploration of notions of awe and awfulness in his work. It will examine the ways in which Celtic Christianity merged with ideas from ritual magic and classical paganism as Machen sought to devise a language able to bear the full weight of his spiritual vision.

Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University): ‘Some Ghoulish Example of her Sex’: The Foreign Female Monster in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900)

This paper examines the metamorphic body of the female monster in Richard Marsh’s urban gothic novels The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) and The Goddess: A Demon (1900). Both novels contain monsters of foreign origin (the eponymous ‘beetle’ and ‘goddess’) who introduce to London a set of sexual and behavioural patterns alien to the moral sentiments of the novels’ English protagonists. These include lurid fantasies of human sacrifice and rape (both male and female); mesmeric control over the minds and bodies of others; and dramatic reversals in gender roles (e.g. female crossdressing, male hysteria and sexual passivity).

The paper explores the gothic rhetoric that establishes the two monsters’ otherness. Following the arguments of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the paper seeks to establish to what extent the ‘monster’s body is culture’,[1] i.e. how current cultural and social debates inform a particular culture’s definition of monstrosity. As Judith Halberstam argues, the monster represents ‘an aggregate of race, class and gender’ that ‘transform[s] the fragments of otherness into one body’.[2] The paper charts these cultural echoes in the two monsters, analysing the process of othering that is used to classify, contain, and, eventually, destroy the monsters in Marsh’s novels.

The alien practices and morals of the monsters, the paper argues, are most clearly apparent in their grotesque, metamorphic female bodies. While the beetle can metamorphose between an attractive young female, an ugly old oriental man and a gigantic scarab, the goddess alters between an inanimate oriental idol, a clockwork torture device, and a female equivalent of Jack the Ripper. The paper seeks to establish the boundary between sensations of fear and desire the bodies of the two monsters provoke. It examines the monsters’ impact on the physical and psychical state of the novels’ British protagonists, noting differences between male and female responses to them. In the process, the paper discusses the potential reaction of the novels’ implied contemporary readership, offering insights into the popularity of urban gothic fiction at the fin de siècle.

Emily Alder (Napier University, Edinburgh): ‘Psychic touches: physical manifestations of the supernatural in Algernon Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson.’

The psychic detective, or doctor, stories of the late nineteenth century blended psychic and supernatural mysteries with the systematic and empirical approach of the rational investigator. One of the first was Sheridan Le Fanu's Dr Hesselius. Following in his footsteps, Algernon Blackwood's John Silence and William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki appeared in the 1900s and were strongly influenced by spiritualist and occult ideas circulating in the late nineteenth century.

This paper traces the relationship between the physical and the psychical touch in the supernatural mysteries of Blackwood and Hodgson. Visually, supernatural occurrences are manifested as bodily parts: a 'monstrous hand', a giant hoof, or a pair of 'gargantuan lips' in the Carnacki stories 'The Gateway of the Monster', 'The Horse of the Invisible', and 'The Whistling Room'; in Blackwood, the dark 'Countenance' of the first John Silence story, 'A Psychical Invasion', or the 'burning feet' of 'The Wendigo' (in which the psychic doctor part is loosely played by Dr Cathcart). The physical intrusion of the supernatural is an act of touching between worlds, creating a rupture which requires a psychic detective, who can bridge the gap, to seal it again. In these mysteries, evidence is liminal. The known worlds of these stories have permeable boundaries across which unseen, supernatural evidence manifests itself, leaving behind physical traces: footprints, injuries, noises, smells. Psychic detectives use their senses in detecting the evidence needed to solve the mystery. This is evidence they can see and touch, but also evidence they can only sense or feel. The value of the evidence provided by these psychic touches can only be interpreted alongside physical evidence, so that the nature of reality or truth is always called into question.

The ambivalence displayed over the interpretation of evidence suggests a reluctance to admit or accept that scientific explanation can account for all experience. Sherlock Holmes 'brought detection as near as an exact science as it ever will be' (A Study in Scarlet). By contrast, for the psychic detective the discourses of materialism and supernaturalism can coexist safely. He is gifted with abilities that allow him to negotiate both physical and supernatural evidence. The scientific approach allows the detective to unravel the mystery of the haunting, but keeps intact the mystery of the thing that haunts. In this way these stories attempt to steer a path between these two conflicting world views.

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[1] Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-25 (p. 4).

[2] Judith Halberstam, ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Studies, 36.3 (Spring 1993), 333-52 (pp. 334, 337).