THE OSCHOLARS

___________

Issue no 44: May 2008

PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

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

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Books and articles on Oscar Wilde
Other publications of fin-de-siècle interest : Michael Field – George Gissing – Henry James – George MacDonald – Octave Mirbeau – Marc-André Raffalovich – John Ruskin
Announcements

Introduction

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review; and we are always willing to consider for publication abstracts or précis of journal articles or published or unpublished doctoral theses.

As usual, names of subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS are printed in bold.

Books in French are covered more fully in our sister publication rue des beaux arts, the bimestrial bulletin of the French branch of The Oscar Wilde Society, which can be accessed via our hub page. This does not preclude reviews in THE OSCHOLARS.

Until our last issue, we also included here a survey of Journals. Our continued reconstruction of our website has suggested a new free-standing page, and the survey will now be found as ‘The Rack & the Press’. Similarly notices about publications on the visual arts will now be found in our new section Visions, reached by clicking its icon

A list of recommended bookshops appears in our section ‘Some Sell and Others Buy’. If ordering, please mention THE OSCHOLARS as this helps ensure a flow of information.

PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS ON OSCAR WILDE

Frank Miles and Oscar Wilde – ‘Such White Lilies’

Molly Whittington-Egan

‘It was a hot summer’s day in 1876, and the two young men, in their prime, were strolling around the ambages of a rectory garden. There were rose walks, and everywhere such white lilies.

The friends were close and confiding: they talked with passion of art, literature and religion, and other more intimate matters.

Baskets of strawberries were brought between sets of the new lawn-tennis. Oscar was awfully good at it - gangling, yet muscular and quick. He was in particularly fine spirits, because he has just got his First. Actually, he had never visited Frank’s family at Bingham Rectory before...

Softbound: 15.6 x 23.4 cm,

112 pp., illustrated.

ISBN 1 904201 09 1

£12.50 / $25.00

Published by The Rivendale Press 15th January 2008. To purchase please use the secure Order Form

Molly Whittington-Egan graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, worked as a social worker in an asylum and trained as a solicitor. She has written many books on criminal and psychological matters, including Doctor Forbes Winslow: Defender of the Insane, Murder on the Bluff (the Yokohama case), Khaki Mischief (the Agra case), and Classic Scottish Murder Stories.

Oscar Wilde

Alexandra Warwick

Tavistock, Devon: Northcote 2007

‘Since he first began publishing his work in the 1880s, Oscar Wilde has been a controversial figure. Although celebrated by many of his contemporaries for his witty and iconoclastic writing, he was imprisoned and disgraced in 1895 and died in poverty and exile. For much of the twentieth century he was best known for his society comedies, but more recent scholarship has focused on his prose work and identified him as an important figure in such fields as Irish writing and queer theory. This study looks at the whole range of Wilde’s writing and places it in the context of later nineteenth century ideas, suggesting that the influence of his studies at Oxford was more profound than has been realized, and that modern philosophy and evolutionary theory had a lasting effect on his representations of the individual and society.’

Alexandra Warwick is Head of English Literature in the Department of English and Linguistics, University of Westminster. She has written extensively on Gothic and 19thC Literature. Her latest books are: Sidelined Sciences? Constructions of Nineteenth-Century Knowledge (2004) and (with Martin Willis) Jack the Ripper in Cultural History (2005).

128pp, 216 x 135 mm Paperback: £12.99

ISBN 0-7463 –1134-6

Oscar Wilde as Detective

Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders (London: John Murray, 2007), reviewed for THE OSCHOLARS by Mark Llewellyn, is now being widely published. A French edition, translated by Jean-Baptiste Dupin as Oscar Wilde et le meurtre aux chandelles, has been published by Éditions 10-18 in Paris in their series ‘Grands Détectives’; a Romanian edition, translated by Gabriel Stoian as Oscar Wilde Si Crimele La Lumina Lumanarii, has been published in Bucharest by Nemira; an Italian edition as Oscar Wilde e i delitti a lume di candela (no translator named) by Sperling & Kupfer of Milan. In the United States, Simon and Schuster have published it under the title of Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance, which is also its title in Australia, where it is published by John Murray. After our initial reservations, we are delighted that this will spread interest in and enthusiasm for Wilde into new quarters. We will report on other editions and continue to publish reviews.

We apologise for the poor quality of the images.

Oscar dead

Staying with fiction, Edition Amélie have published Oh! Père Lachaise, Oscar’s Wilde Purgatory by Jim Yates, backed by an informative website at

http://www.operelachaise.com/ from which it can be ordered.

.

Two new articles on Oscar Wilde

Christelle Betelli : ‘Le Double ou l’Esthétique du Paradoxe dans trois œuvres d’Oscar Wilde : The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Im. portance of Being Earnest et Salomé’ Cycnos vol.25 : special issue on ‘The Double’, February 2008 http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=924

Marie-Noëlle Zeender : ‘Le Dorian Gray et ses doubles : les avatars de la réplication’ Cycnos vol.25 : special issue on ‘The Double’, February 2008 http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/document.html?id=1006

Oscar Wilde and Henry James

We can now publish the Table of Contents of Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture by Michèle Mendelssohn (Edinburgh University Press 2007), which we announced in earlier editions of THE OSCOLARS. Dr Mendelssohn edited our Richard Ellmann supplement in 2007.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND PERMISSIONS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (33 black and white images)

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 4

‘Wild thoughts and desire! Things I can’t tell you - words I can’t speak!’: the Drama of Identity in The Importance of Being Earnest and Guy Domville

CHAPTER 1

‘I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde’: Washington Square and the politics of Transatlantic Aestheticism

CHAPTER 5

Despoiling Poynton: James, the Wilde trials, and Interior Decoration

CHAPTER 2

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and the Reinvention of Aestheticism

CHAPTER 6

‘A nest of almost infant blackmailers!’: the End of Innocence in The Turn of the Screw and De Profundis

CHAPTER 3

The school of the future as well as the present: Wilde’s impressions of James in ‘Intentions’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’

Bibliography

Index

Oscar, wow!

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz (New York: Riverhead) was published on 6th September 2007. 352 pages ISBN 9781594489587. Mentioned in our last issue, this is a sort of spin-off novel of the Wilde legend, and has now been reviewed in our ‘The Critic as Critic‘ section by María DeGuzmán, Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature and Director of Latina/o Studies, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Junot Díaz has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this novel. Here is the link: http://www.pulitzer..org/year/2008/fiction/.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is also available as an audiobook read by Jonathan Davis with Staci Snell (16 Hours; 13 CDs) 9780143142805

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

Michael Field

We very much welcome the announcement, via a call for papers, of the inaugural edition of The Michaelian, an academic, non-profit, peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated to the study of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and their circle. Publication is intended to be annual. We welcome contributions such as articles, book reviews, reports of events regarding Michael Field and late-Victorian literature and culture (announcements, exhibitions, conferences…). Teaching experiences related to introducing Michael Field to undergraduates is also of interest. The journal seeks to bring together advanced graduate students and scholars from many universities to create a unique forum for a wide-ranging discussion engaging with all aspects of Michael Field scholarship, including literature and literary history, feminist and lesbian/queer perspectives, collaborative writing, life-writing, theatre history, publishing history and art history. Please submit essays by 1st May 2008, to Sharon Bickle, Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Monash University, <sharon.bickle@arts.monash.edu.au>. For more on the Michael Field Society, see our Society page.

George Gissing (1)

Mitsuharu Matsuoka writes

George Gissing was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, on 22nd November 1857. In order to commemorate his sesquicentennial birthday, I have edited a Japanese critical anthology of 25 thematic chapters with the title, translated word for word, Society and Culture in the Late Victorian Age with Special Reference to Gissing: In the Year of His Sesquicentennial.

As you know, Japan has not completely emerged from a serious economic slump yet. Under these circumstances, practical knowledge and skills in a specialized area are valued, while the development of cultivated human resources is talked down. The former offers lucrative business opportunities, but the latter does not bring a prompt return. That is perhaps the reason. I believe, however, that professional education and liberal arts education at university must be, as it were, bicycle wheels.

In reply to a young man who regards classical literacy as of no earthly use, Edmund Langley, the hero of Sleeping Fires, speaks for Gissing: ‘The world never had such need of the Greeks as in our time. Vigour, sanity, and joy - that’s their gospel’ (Chapter 4). This reply reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s opinion on the function of culture in Culture and Anarchy (1869): ‘And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so’ (Chapter 1).

The Japanese should read more of Gissing’s works, not least when they are mercenary in the protracted economic recession. Little did he dream, I suppose, that his works would be evaluated by Japanese scholars in the 21st century. It can be easily imagined that Gissing would have thanked Professor Pierre Coustillas, the leading authority in Gissing studies. My thanks go as well to Professor Coustillas, who wrote a short Gissing biography and contributed a chapter about Gissing’s pacifism for the above-mentioned critical anthology.

It is a great pity that this critical anthology, running to some 550 pages, is completely in Japanese, but it would be much appreciated if you could at least take a glance at the jacket. http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/GIF-GG-150.jpg

George Gissing (2)

New George Gissing Book (Special George Gissing Conference book launch offer until April 25, 2008)

Spellbound, George Gissing

Vol 1: The Storyteller

Vol 2: A Twenty-first Century Reappraisal

Christine Huguet (ed.), Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3, France

Equilibris Publishing 2008

Contents:

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

George Gissing

CHRISTINE HUGUET

Introduction

A Note on the Texts and the Illustrations

ISBN:

978-90-5976-007-3 hardcover

978-90-5976-008-0 paperback

978-90-5976-009-7 print-on-demand

978-90-5976-010-3 e-book

384 pages; 17 b&w illustrations

VOLUME 1: THE STORYTELLER

VOLUME 2: A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY REAPPRAISAL

Gretchen

Diana Maltz: Romantic Idylls and Market Realities: Continental Europe in Gissing’s Gretchen

An English Coast-Picture

Bouwe Postmus: The Popularity of the Picturesque: Oliver Bell Bunce and Gissing’s An English Coast-Picture

Phoebe’s Fortune / Phöbes Glück

Markus Neacey: The Textual History of Phoebe’s Fortune: Towards a Third Version of

Gissing’s Story via Eduard Bertz’s German Translation

The Day of Silence

John Sloan: The Day of Silenc": Gissing and the Victorian Celebration of Death

A Midsummer Madness

Barbara Rawlinson: A Midsummer Madness

By the Kerb

Christine Devine: By the Kerb: Too Radical?

The Foolish Virgin

Constance Harsh: The Foolish Virgin and the One Thing Needful

Spellbound

David Grylls: Addicted to Newsprint: Spellbound

A Daughter of the Lodge

M. D. Allen: Chesney Wold and A Daughter of the Lodge: The Death of the Feudal Spirit

The Pig and Whistle

Christine Huguet: The Pig and Whistle; Or, Kindliness Rewarded

APPENDIX A

Notes on Contributors

APPENDIX B

Chronology of Gissing’s Short Stories

Henry James

A new issue of The Cambridge Quarterly is available online:

Special Issue: Henry James in the Modern World: March 2008; Vol. 37, No. 1

The Table of Contents below is also available online at: http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol37/issue1/index.dtl

Tamara Follini and Philip Horne: Introduction: Henry James in the Modern World

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:1-2. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/1

Michael Anesko: James in America: In Quest of (the) Material

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:3-15. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/3

R. D. Gooder: The American Scene, or Paradise Lost

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:16-29. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/16

Tamara L. Follini: Habitations of Modernism: Henry James’s New York, 1907

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:30-46. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/30

Philip Horne: ‘Reinstated’: James in Roosevelt’s Washington

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:47-63. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/47

Christopher Ricks: Derogation from ‘The Next Time’

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:64-78. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/64

Adrian Poole: Henry James and the Mobile Phone

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:79-89. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/79

Millicent Bell: ‘Type’ in The Wings of the Dove and the Invention of Kate Croy

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:90-97. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/90

Jonathan Freedman: What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, The Golden Bowl, and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:98-113. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/98

Nicola Bradbury: Rules of Engagement and Strategies of Withdrawal: The War on Terror in ‘The Bench of Desolation’

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:114-120. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/114

Max Saunders: Master Narratives

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:121-131. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/121

Jean Gooder: Henry James and George Sand: Lives and After-lives

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:132-149. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/132

Sergio Perosa: Henry James and Unholy Art Acquisitions

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:150-163. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/150

T. J. Lustig: James, Arnold, ‘Culture’, and ‘Modernity’; or, A Tale of Two Dachshunds

Cambridge Quarterly 2008 37:164-193. http://camqtly.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/37/1/164

George MacDonald

Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay, Lilith, récit merveilleux (1895) de George MacDonald. Traduction et introduction de Françoise Dupeyron-Lafay. Paris: Michel Houdiard éditeur, 2007.

Format 14 X 22 cm, 360 pages. ISBN : 9 782912 673572

Prix de vente: 22 euros.

Le livre peut être acheté dans le commerce ou commandé directement à l’éditeur (frais de port offerts) : E-mail : michel.houdiard.editeur@wanadoo.fr

Octave Mirbeau

Pierre Michel (Société Octave Mirbeau) writes

Chers collègues, J’ai le plaisir de vous informer de la parution, à l’occasion du très riche et passionnant colloque Octave Mirbeau de Strasbourg, d’un joli petit volume illustré intitulé Un aller simple pour l’Octavie. Il s’agit d’un ensemble de textes recueillis par Kinda Mubaideen, de l’université de Strasbourg, et inspirés par La 628-E8 d’Octave Mirbeau. Ils sont rédigés par des participants, de toutes nationalités, aux ateliers d’écriture animés par Kinda Mubaideen,  à Strasbourg et à Sarajevo (où ont collaboré amicalement des Bosniaques, des Serbes et des Croates). L’artiste strasbourgeois Lolo Wagner en a assuré les nombreuses illustrations (36 en tout).

En même temps qu’un hommage à Mirbeau et à sa 628-E8, il s’agit d’un travail qui contribue à rapprocher les peuples et les cultures, conformémant au voeu le plus cher de l’imprécateur au coeur fidèle. Et quel bel hommage, aussi, à la langue et à la littérature françaises de la part d’étudiants et traducteurs étrangers ! 

Ce beau petit volume illustré, édité par la Société Octave Mirbeau, peut être commandé à la Société Mirbeau, 10 bis rue André Gautier, 49000 - ANGERS. Son prix est de 10 euros franco. 

Octave Mirbeau : Recent Publications

* Un aller simple pour l’Octavie, Société Octave Mirbeau, septembre 2007, 64 pages, 10 € (franco). Il s’agit d’un ensemble de textes recueillis par Kinda Mubaideen et inspirés par La 628-E8 de Mirbeau. Ils sont rédigés par les participants, de toutes nationalités, aux ateliers d’écriture animés par Kinda Mubaideen, à Sarajevo et à Strasbourg. L’artiste strasbourgeois Lolo Wagner a assuré les nombreuses illustrations de cette oeuvre éminemment européenne. On peut la commander à la Société Mirbeau (michel.mirbeau@free.fr).

* Robert Ziegler, The Nothing Machine : The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau, Amsterdam – New-York, Rodopi, collection « Faux Titre », n° 298, septembre 2007,  250 pages, 50 €. On peut le commander à Rodopi : http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=FAUX+298.

* Octave Mirbeau, Les Mémoires de mon ami, L’Arbre vengeur, octobre 2007, 152 pages, 11 €. Préface d’Arnaud Vareille.  A commander à  L’Arbre vengeur : http://arbre.vengeur.free.fr/catalogue.htm.

* Pierre Michel, Octave Mirbeau, Les Acharnistes, collection « La petite encyclopédie à l’usage des indigents », n° 9, octobre 2007, 34 pages, 3,50 €. A commander aux Acharnistes : http://editions-acharnistes.com/catalogue.htm.

* Laure Himy et Gérard Poulouin, sous la direction de, Octave Mirbeau : passions et anathèmes, Actes du colloque Mirbeau de Cerisy-la-Salle, 28 septembre-2 octobre 2005, à paraître fin 2007, Presses de l’Université de Caen.

* Claude Herzfeld,  La littérature, dernier refuge du mythe ? Mirbeau, Philippe, Alain-Fournier..., L’Harmattan 2007, 372 pp, 30 €.

* Samuel Lair, Octave Mirbeau l’iconoclaste,  à paraître début  2008 à L’Harmattan.

* Cahiers Octave Mirbeau, à paraître en mars 2008, environ 350 pages, 23 €. À commander à la Société Octave Mirbeau (gratuit pour nos adhérents) : michel.mirbeau@free.fr

Marc-André Raffalovich

Patrick Cardon, author of Discours littéraire et scientifique fin-de-siècle. La discussion sur les homosexualités dans la revue du Dr Lacassagne, Les Archives d’anthropologie criminelle (1886-1914) has published Autour de Marc-André Raffalovich. Ôrizons, 2008, collection “homosexualités”. 

« L’inversion sexuelle [...] va devenir une des questions de l’avenir ».

Marc-André Raffalovich (1896)

De 1886 à 1914 paraissent les Archives d’anthropologie criminelle qui veulent révolutionner la notion de criminalité (école française de Lacassagne contre école italienne de Lombroso). Les débats sur l’homosexualité y sont particulièrement importants. Tout en donnant un aperçu sur la conception typiquement fin-de-siècle de cette sensibilité, ils mettent en avant la personnalité toute littéraire de Marc-André Raffalovich qui tenta de devenir le Magnus Hirschfeld français.

Patrick Cardon, docteur ès-Lettres et diplômé de Sciences Politiques présente ici un travail qu’il a actualisé depuis plus de vingt ans et qui a inspiré l’édition de nombreux textes précieux pour l’histoire culturelle des homosexualités au sein de GayKitschCamp.com (QuestionDeGenre/GKC)

La collection « homosexualités » répond à un besoin d’accessibilité rapide aux documents et études nécessaires à l’élaboration actuelle de l’histoire culturelle – pluridisciplinaire – dite LGBTQI (lesbienne, gay, bisexuelle, transgenre, queer et intersexe). Ce sera la continuation de la bibliothèque tentée par Michel Foucault. Et dans son esprit.

Patrick Cardon/GayKitschCamp, Éditions QuestionDeGenre/GKC, 5 rue Pavillon 34000 Montpellier. www.GayKitschCamp.com

John Ruskin

Anuradha Chatterjee writes :

Those interested in Ruskin studies might be interested to know that my doctoral thesis is now online in the University of New South Wales. Follow this link http://lrd.library.unsw.edu.au/F?RN=122690079 and use "anuradha chatterjee" as parameters in the keyword search.

I think it is free to the public for an unlimited period of time. While there is no restriction on copying, I would appreciate it if it is moderate. This is because the chapters are being developed for publication.

The thesis deals with Ruskin, science and gender, dress reform, and architectural styles.

Hope you enjoy reading it. But mostly, I hope this will generate some cross disciplinary collaborations within and beyond THE OSCHOLARS.

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

Folklore

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction by Jason Marc Harris was published in February 2008 by Ashgate.

The publisher’s blurb reads

Jason Marc Harris’s ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction. His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics. Harris’s analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

New from Valancourt

James D Jenkins and Valancourt Books announce their latest publications of new scholarly editions of Victorian-era texts.

Round the Red Lamp and Other Medical Writings by Arthur Conan Doyle, edited by Robert Darby.  Includes the 1894 short story collection Round the Red Lamp, plus three previously uncollected stories and a generous selection of Dr. Doyle’s nonfiction medical writings.

The Rose and the Key (1871) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, edited by Frances Chiu.  Features a groundbreaking new introduction, arguing for reconsideration of Le Fanu’s politics and a reading of the novel as a commentary on Anglo-Irish tensions; this edition is the first to reprint the original serialized text of the novel.

Mystery of the Sea (1902) by Bram Stoker, edited by Carol A. Senf.

The Garden God (1905) by Forrest Reid, edited by Michael Matthew Kaylor.  A meticulous scholarly edition of Reid’s controversial novel of love between two schoolboys.  Dedicated to Henry James, Reid’s idol, the book was condemned by James, who never spoke to Reid again.

The King’s Assegai, The Weird of Deadly Hollow, and Renshaw Fanning’s Quest by Bertram Mitford, edited by Gerald Monsman.  Three 1890s adventure novels dealing with life in South Africa before and after British colonization.

Nada the Lily (1892) by H. Rider Haggard, edited by Gerald Monsman.  Haggard’s adventure/romance/fantasy set among the Zulus, before British colonization.

More information on these and other titles can be found on the website at http://www.valancourtbooks.com, along with information for those interested in contributing an introduction for a future edition.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies

The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies has just published its first online issue (vol 12.1) at http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/AJVS.

Previously a print-based annual, AJVS is a fully refereed international journal now published in May and November each year. AJVS is supported by AVSA, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association. The current issue has pieces by Lyn Pykett on Victorian beginnings, Kieran Dolin on symbolic revolution in Dickens, Abigail Dennis on self-starvation in Sarah Grand and Graham Law on problems with the publishing history of Gissing’s A Life’s Morning.

The journal is actively seeking contributions on any aspect of Victorian Studies, and particularly encourages work on interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary topics.

For further information about AJVS, please visit our website or contact the editor, Jock Macleod, direct at J.Macleod@griffith.edu.au.

Kristine Moruzi, AJVS journal manager, PhD candidate, University of Melbourne. kmoruzi@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net

Michael Eberle Sinatra and Dino Franco Felluga, have announced ‘a new venue for Victorian publication. Romanticism on the Net, which has been published continually since 1996, has now expanded into the Victorian period and has been renamed Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (or RaVoN--pronounced ‘rave on’).  The inaugural issue is now available at the following URL: http://www.ravon.umontreal.ca/. Edited by Jerome McGann, the issue includes new essays by William R. McKelvy (‘Iconic Destiny and “The Lady of Shalott”: Living in a World of Images’); Andrew Stauffer (‘Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library’); Natalie M. Houson (‘Order and Interpretation in Augusta Webster’s Portraits’); Nicholas Frankel (‘The Textual Environment of George Meredith’); Stephen Arata (‘Stevenson’s Careful Observances’); Herbert F. Tucker (‘Doughty’s The Dawn in Britain and the Modernist Eclipse of the Victorian’); and Bethany Nowviskie (‘A Scholar’s Guide to Research, Collaboration, and Publication in NINES’). The next issue will be a special issue on ‘Victorian Internationalisms’ edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad and Julia M. Wright. Please visit the web site for information on how to submit articles for publication. 

The International Advisory Board now includes the following Victorian scholars: Amanda Anderson, Johns Hopkins University; Nancy Armstrong, Brown University; Laurel Brake, Birkbeck, University of London; Joseph Childers, University of California, Riverside; Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University; Andrew Elfenbein, University of Minnesota; Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London; Regenia Gagnier, University of Exeter; Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida; Lauren Goodlad, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Elaine Hadley, University of Chicago; Antony Harrison, North Carolina State University; George P. Landow, Brown University; Michael Levenson, University of Virginia; Andrew Miller, Indiana University; Leah Price, Harvard University; Linda Shires, Syracuse University; Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa; Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia; John Walsh, Indiana University.

Taylor & Francis - Arts & Humanities Collection

The Arts & Humanities Collection features online content published by Routledge between 1997 and the present day. 93 journal titles are available to explore online via the easily searchable informaworld platform.  28 journals are listed in Thomson Scientific’s Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index. The Arts & Humanities Collection covers History, Literature, Language & Linguistics, Music, Philosophy, Religion, Theatre & Performance and Visual Arts.

The Arts & Humanities Collection includes:

Contemporary British History - an iFirst title giving immediate access to the latest key research articles

Prestigious titles such as Slavery & Abolition, Atlantic Studies and Social History

Heritage titles such as Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History - now in its 34th year of publication

Journals published in association with prominent societies such as Intellectual History Review - the official journal of the International Society for Intellectual History

For more information on the Arts & Humanities Collection, please visit www.informaworld.com/librarians_artscollection

The Rossetti Archive

Scholars who are interested in making an electronic edition of books or works associated with the PRB, its associated circle and its aftermath, will be interested to know that The Rossetti Archive will host the publication of such projects and will provide the peer review that allows them to be aggregated within the NINES (www.nines.org) peer-reviewed online publishing environment.

The first such edition was just published as part of the most recent release of The Rossetti Archive. It is Paul Fyfe’s critical edition of William Michael Rossetti’s important poem ‘Mrs. Holmes Gray’. The link to the edition is at: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/about/new.html.

Soon to be published in the same way will be P. C. Fleming’s critical edition of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and a number of other works are in process of being edited.

One significant ‘technical’ advantage of publishing in this venue is that editors will be supplied with a ready-to-use xml file format.  All the editor needs to learn is the use of an xml text editor like Oxygen.  These works will also be taking advantage of the specialized search functions and search domain of The Rossetti Archive.  The other advantages I’ve already noted above: peer review of the work and aggregation in NINES.

Anyone interested should write to Jerome McGann (jjm2f@virginia.edu)

Absinthe

H-France Review Vol. 8 (March 2008), No. 40.

The following review may be found on the H-France web page at: http://www.h-france.net/vol8reviews/vol8no40haine.pdf

Jad Adams, Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. 294 pp. $24.95 US (pb). ISBN 0-29-200-000-0; Marie-Claude Delahaye, L’Absinthe au Féminin. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence: Equinoxe, 2007. 136 pp. €19 (pb). ISBN 978-2-84135559-4.

Review by Scott Haine, University of California Santa Cruz and Holy Names College.

Copyright © 2008 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. No republication or distribution will be permitted without permission.

The Illustrated London News

The report at the link below says that new owners of the Illustrated London News (and the Graphic) will have their texts digitised.

http://www.itnews.it/2008/0113100201692/the-illustrated-london-news-turns-a-new-page.html

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse)

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) is a publicly-funded academic research project, based in London, which is digitizing six nineteenth-century periodicals:

Monthly Repository 1806-1838 (plus its supplement, the Unitarian Chronicle); Northern Star 1837-1852 (including the Chartist portraits published as supplements); Leader 1850-1860; Tomahawk 1867-1870; English Woman’s Journal 1858-1864; Publishers’ Circular 1880-1890.

‘ncse is one of a number of projects currently underway to digitize the vast amounts of nineteenth-century print that currently remain under-utilized in various dispersed archives.  However, compared to the activities of Proquest et al., we are working on a much more modest scale.  Although ncse still represents some 98,565 pp, we feel that this smaller cluster of six titles allows us to engage more robustly with the intellectual questions that underpin such projects.  For instance, we are keen to engage with the genre of periodical publication, and so we are designing ways in which generic features such as seriality, departments, advertisements, front matter, indices, illustrations etc. can be handled in digital form.  Although we recognize that many of our users will simply use the edition to search for relevant terms such as names, we believe that these other components are integral to the periodical as genre, and so should be foregrounded in any digital edition of them.  Rather than treat digital projects as simply delivery systems for electronic versions of paper, we imagine ncse as a new edition of these titles published for the twenty first century.’

The ncse newsletter is available for download from http://www.ncse.kcl.ac.uk/news/news.html

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