An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

Concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Issue no 49 : March / April 2009

oscholars@gmail.com

EDITORIAL PAGE

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

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

For Section II, please click

Clicking  takes you to a Table of Contents;

clicking  takes you to the hub page for our website, with links to all our journals and webpages;

clicking  takes you to the home page of THE OSCHOLARS .

The sunflower  navigates to other pages.

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS I: ITEMS ON THIS PAGE
I.  NEWS from the Editor	7. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop	XII.  OGRAPHIES
II.  In the LIBRARY	IV. ON THE CURRICULUM: TEACHING AND RESEARCHING WILDE, THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE, ÆSTHETICISM AND DECADENCE	XIII. MAD, SCARLET MUSIC
III.  NEWS, NOTES & QUERIES	V.  THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	XIV.  NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES
1. i.m. Sally Ledger	VI. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH	XV. COLOUR SUPPLEMENT
2. Word & Image	VII. LETTERS FROM OUR EDITORS	XVI. OUR FAMILY OF JOURNALS
3. Notes Towards an Iconography of Oscar Wilde.	VIII.  BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS	XVII. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
4.   A Preface by Robert Ross	IX.  OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE /WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE
5. News from the V&A	X.  VIDEO OF THE MONTH
6. The 1890s Archive	XI.  WEB FOOT NOTES

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

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

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

I. NEWS FROM THE EDITOR

An Oscar Wilde Centenary

The weekend of 18th/19th July 2009 marks the centenary of the transfer of Wilde’s remains from Bagneux cemetery to Père Lachaise. The Société Oscar Wilde en France is arranging appropriate commemoration, and details will be given in our June issue. Any reader who chances to be in Paris, or wishes to donate flowers or a wreath, should write to the SOWeF at melmoth.paris@gmail.com.

Innovations

We are proud to announce two additions to our stable of publications: THE LATCHKEY and RAVENNA: details are given below. We also intend reviving MOORINGS under a new editor, Tiffany Perala, who takes over from Mark Llewellyn. New members of our editorial team are Lene Østermark-Johansen (University of Copenhagen), who joins us as Denmark editor with effect from September, Ilze Kačāne (Daugavpils University), who joins as Editor for Latvia, and Claire O’Callaghan (University of Leicester), who joins THE LATCHKEY team as public relations editor. Dr Kačāne’s first Letter from Latvia appears below.

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

II. THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

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

In September 2007, we began a year-long project of putting such articles on line at the rate of one a week, and were very happy with the response. This systematic project has now come to an end, but we continue to put articles up on an ad hoc basis. These appear in our section called LIBRARY, which now contains the largest collection of essays on Wilde so far assembled.  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.  A subsection, IN OTHER BOOKCASES, is similarly arranged but gives links to articles that appear elsewhere on the internet.

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

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

---

New postings are announced on our discussion forum

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

The late Sally Ledger

All readers of THE OSCHOLARS will by now be aware of the tragic death from a cerebral haemorrhage of Professor Sally Ledger, a leading light in fin-de-siècle studies and a consistent and helpful supporter of this journal. John Mc Rae writes ‘I cherish some supportive mails she sent while we were preparing TELENY REVISITED, and in particular a very warm and enthusiastic mail when it was published’. We are here publishing a tribute to her written for THE OSCHOLARS by her friend and colleague Hilary Fraser, to whom our gratitude. The photograph of Sally was kindly supplied by her husband Jim Porteous. We extend our own condolences to Sally’s family and friends.

A couple of weeks ago I was checking through some old emails from Sally (of which I find I have, incidentally 1,139 in my inbox!) to find the contact list for the ‘Victorian Ladies Night’ she used to organize every year for a group of us Victorianists (both male and female), when I came upon an email about the farewell party we were planning for her last summer, as she left to take up her new job, the distinguished Hildred Carlile Chair in English at Royal Holloway. ‘Let’s keep the leaving speeches to 30 seconds apiece,’ she wrote, ‘otherwise the whole of the two hours will be taken up by it, with no time to party’.

At the evening we held in Sally’s memory in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck last week, the friends, colleagues and students who spoke about her didn’t quite manage to keep to 30 seconds apiece, and we didn’t feel quite like partying afterwards, but we did feel a strong need in the School that was blessed by having Sally at the hub of it for 13 years to give all those who were close to Sally through their and her Birkbeck connection a chance to gather to remember her, and to celebrate her great gift of life. Many people came, and the large space was packed to overflowing. We were glad we had arranged a video link to accommodate those unable to squeeze into the room, so that they too could witness the many heartfelt tributes to a remarkable woman who touched so many people’s lives.

In her eloquent funeral oration, Sally’s friend and mentor Regenia Gagnier spoke of how extraordinary it was to experience the shock waves as news of her death rippled out across the world, each time zone bringing a deluge of emails expressive of the great global grief at her loss, from the east coast to the west coast of the US, and then Australasia, as far away as Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand, where within a week Sally was to have delivered a keynote paper at the Australasian Victorian Studies Association Conference.

At the heart of that radiating presence, at the centre of Sally’s life, affirming and sustaining her as she blossomed professionally, were Jim her husband and Richard her son, of course, and her close family and friends. And at the centre of her professional life for many years were Sally’s friends, students and colleagues at Birkbeck, especially those of us working in the School of English and Humanities, and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. How privileged we all are to have had the opportunity to work closely, and party, with a woman so widely loved and so deeply mourned across the world.

Part of that privilege was, of course, to have worked with a very brilliant academic, who played a key role in redefining the field of nineteenth-century studies. In 1997, two years after joining Birkbeck, Sally published The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle, a truly ground-breaking study of late Victorian women writers and radicals that reclaimed a body of work and a cultural moment that had hitherto suffered a critical neglect now unimaginable. Her readings of fiction at the Fin are wonderfully alert to its ideological contradictions, and to how the politics of gender, race and class are worked out in literary form. Her reputation in the field was consolidated with the publication of three edited volumes on the political and cultural history of the Fin de Siècle – her ‘yellow book’, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, edited with Roger Luckhurst in 2000, has become a classroom classic – and a book on Henrik Ibsen, and she was made Professor at Birkbeck in 2005.

From writing on the under-studied and decidedly non-canonical writers of the Fin, Sally shifted her attention to that most canonical of high Victorian writers Charles Dickens. At the local level, she took over the organization of Dickens Day, which has long been associated with Birkbeck, and together with Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard transformed it into a cutting-edge annual conference. And on the international stage she became centrally involved in the Dickens Project convened by the University of California at Santa Cruz. Despite the demands of being a dynamic and popular Head of School from 2002-2005, she published Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination in 2007 with Cambridge University Press, an acclaimed book which has changed the way we read Dickens by contextualizing his work within the vibrant dissenting political culture of the 1830s and 1840s. Her academic interests in the popular and the radical, as well as in the previously under-studied feminist writers of the Fin, convey the essence of Sally’s politics and her passions, and so did her new work, on sentimentality, speak of the importance of the emotional and affective life for this warm, loving woman.

Which brings me, of course, to the ways in which Sally’s working relationships with colleagues and students went far far beyond the coolly professional, so that teaching with her, or been taught by her, talking about research with her, running and attending conferences with her, writing grant applications and staffing bids with her, preparing agendas and sitting on committees with her, was always so much richer than a merely intellectual or administrative event. She brought to her professional and intellectual life a real humanity, so that her warmth, her generosity, her integrity and sense of justice, her fearless honesty, her irrepressible sense of humour, fed into her scholarship and her academic leadership in incalculably significant ways. Sally knew how to play all the notes.

Her work was enviably well integrated into the rest of her life. Her great erudition notwithstanding, she was immersed in popular culture, from shopping to music to football, and was partial to the latest slang. And her colleagues and students became, seamlessly, her friends. ‘You alright?’ she would say, with real concern behind the casual words, those warm brown eyes as full of compassion as at other times they were of twinkle and fun; and then she’d give her trademark thumbs up. The very first time I almost met Sally was at a symposium organized by Isobel Armstrong, at which I was speaking. A great admirer of her work on the New Woman and the Fin, but having never met since I’d been in Australia for many years, I asked Isobel to point her out in the audience, and after my paper went to find her, to be told that she had gone off for lunch with a postgraduate student. It was so like Sally to make sure there was always a good mix of business and pleasure. At the leaving do I mentioned at the beginning, the School’s parting gifts to her were a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities and a Mulberry handbag (I haven’t even mentioned her love of fashion).

Sally, we miss you. But how lucky we are to have had you in our lives, and as often as I have wept over you these past few weeks, I have smiled at the happy memories you have left us, and the inspiration to be better people.

· Sally Ledger, Professor of Victorian Studies, born 14 December 1961, died 21 January 2009.

Professor Hilary Fraser holds the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair in Nineteenth-Century Studies, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. For the obituary in The Guardian, click here. We also quote from VICTORIA (2nd February) these last words, from Debbie Harrison.

Today was Sally's funeral. In a bleak landscape of sweeping snow, those who managed to overcome the very British obstacles of closed roads, suspended London underground services, and cancelled buses and trains, found comfort in the poignant Humanist service and burial at the New Wilbury Hills Cemetery in Letchworth Garden City. It was beautiful and very sad. Oddly, I found myself wondering if Sally would have liked the winter landscape - so very Victorian in its brutality and splendour. But then I remembered that she much preferred the warmth and sunshine of Santa Cruz. I cannot express my grief and sense of loss. Sally was with me through my part-time MA and PhD at Birkbeck. She was my friend, mentor, and inspiration. In George Eliot's words, she was ‘my loving, large-souled’ Sally.

Word & Image

Following on from their well-established Word & Image BA course, Michael Brophy and Pascale Mc Garry have the pleasure to present a new International MA in Word & Image starting in University College, Dublin and l’Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail next semester. Learn about early modern engraving, modern and contemporary art and literature, film, comic strips, theoretical approaches to text and image. Study in both UCD and Toulouse on a new Socrates-funded postgraduate exchange. Details from Pascale Mc Garry, @ and Michael Brophy, @.

Notes Towards an Iconography of Oscar Wilde

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Ulster) sends us this information taken from the Press release of a new exhibition: Elizabeth Peyton at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

The first exhibition in Ireland by Elizabeth Peyton, one of the most outstanding American artists of her generation, opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 1 April 2009. Elizabeth Peyton: Reading and Writing presents some 20 works, comprising carefully selected portraits of youthful, romantic individuals and still lifes depicting table tops covered with books, bouquets of flowers and collectables, chosen to work in harmony with the domestic setting of the East Ground Galleries at IMMA. Presenting paintings and works on paper, the exhibition illustrates an intensely personal body of work, which confidently places beauty at the centre of contemporary art. The exhibition has a particular focus on poetry and literature, interiors and photographs, desire and love.

Peyton first came to prominence in the early 1990s as one of the few young artists exploring figurative painting. Although her paintings owe a clear debt to 19th-century masters, such as Edouard Manet and John Singer Sargent, Peyton’s work also demonstrates an intimate understanding of 20th-century artists, such as David Hockney, Alex Katz and Andy Warhol. Despite these influences, Peyton has developed a highly personal body of work, deeply rooted in her surroundings and her readings. Her dazzling palette of jewel-like colours and her refined graphic sensibility are combined in enormously seductive works, both in content and form. Over the years her work has evolved into an increasingly fascinating chronicle of contemporary American life and culture.

The portraits and still lifes in the exhibition encapsulate many of Peyton’s favourite sources of inspiration, which have included William Shakespeare, 19th-century Realist or Romantic authors, Nouvelle Vague filmmakers of the 1960s and present day singer-poets, such as Patti Smith and Bob Dylan. An early work, Oscar and Bosie, 1998, depicts Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, two doomed lovers. Here Peyton characteristically brings together the subculture of a past age with contemporary popular culture, as the faces of Wilde and Bosie are interchangeable with those of Stephen Fry and Jude Law, who portrayed Wilde and Douglas in the 1997 film Wilde.

A Preface by Robert Ross

Robert Ross: Wilde’s Selected Poems. Italicised commentary by D.C. Rose

This volume was first published by Methuen & Co as no 77 in their ‘Shilling Library on 17^th August 1911, with this brief preface by Robert Ross. The preface forms pages v and vi. Ross dedicated the volume to Helen Carew.

It is thought that a selection from Oscar Wilde’s early verses may be of interest to a large public at present familiar only with the always popular Ballad of Reading Gaol, also included in this volume. The poems were first collected by their author when he was twenty-six years old, and though never, until recently, well received by the critics, have survived the test of NINE editions. Readers will be able to make for themselves the obvious and striking contrast between these first and last phases of Oscar Wilde’s literary activity. The intervening period was devoted almost entirely to dramas, prose, fiction, essays, and criticism.

ROBERT ROSS

Reform Club,

April 5, 1911

The reference to nine editions is explained in a note on p.iv:

Wilde’s poems were first published in volume form in 1881, and were reprinted four times before the end of 1882. A new edition with additional poems, including Ravenna, The Sphinx, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, was first published (limited issue on hand made paper and Japanese vellum) by Methuen & Co in March 1908. A further edition (making the seventh) with some omissions from the edition of 1908, but including two new poems, was published in September 1909. Eighth edition, November 1909. Ninth edition, December 1909. Tenth edition December 1910. Eleventh edition, December 1911.

The editions referred to run parallel to the ‘Shilling Library’ edition, the publishing history of which is also given:

First published August 17^th 1911; second edition August 1911; third edition September 1911; fourth edition October 1911; fifth edition March 1912; sixth edition December 1912; seventh edition September 1913; eighth edition 1914.

The ‘Shilling Library’ edition is notable for containing two versions of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. Ross explains this in a note on p.ix:

At the end of the complete text will be found a shorter version based on the original draft of the poem. This is included for the benefit of reciters and their audiences who have found the entire poem too long for declamation. I have tried to obviate a difficulty, without officiously exercising the ungrateful prerogatives of a literary executor, by falling back on a text which represents the author’s first scheme for a poem – never intended of course for recitation.

Note that Ross does not say outright that this text is actually that of Wilde’s ‘first scheme’. The ambiguity is reinforced by a further note on p.61: ‘A version based on the original draft of the poem’. W.B. Yeats’ reduced version of The Ballad for the Oxford Book of English Verse is well-known; this one by Ross less so. Of particular interest is his idea that his version can profitably be used by ‘reciters’ for ‘declamation’.

The other poems that Ross selected for this edition are ‘Ave Imperatrix’, ‘To My Wife (with a copy of my poems)’, ‘Magdalen Walks’, ‘Theocritus–a villanelle’, ‘Greece’, ‘Portia (to Ellen Terry)’, ‘Fabien dei Franchi (to Henry Irving)’, ‘Phèdre (to Sarah Bernhardt)’, ‘On hearing the Dies Iræ sung in the Sistine Chapel’, ‘Ave Maria Gratia Plena’, ‘Libertatis Sacra Fames’, ‘Roses and Rue’, ‘From “The Garden of Eros”’, ‘The Harlot’s House’, ‘From “The Burden of Itys”’, ‘Flower of Love’.

The volume was printed by The Northumberland Press, Waterloo House, Thornton Street, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The above is taken from the copy in my collection.

DCR, March 2009.

The 1890s Online

The 1890s Online is designed to facilitate the scholarly study of fin-de-siècle culture, based at Ryerson University. The archive focuses on visual/verbal/aural relations in a decade significant for its developments in print — book design, typography, illustration, photography, periodicals, newspapers, posters, playbills and advertising — as well as for its developments in the performance arts — music hall, theatre, and the emerging technologies of cinema. In its ideally envisioned form, The 1890s Online will include the tools for complex searches and comparisons of the period's images and texts as well as searchable audio links to its songs, sounds, and speeches. The archive is overseen by an international editorial board of scholars with expertise in the literature, art, and culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Click here to learn more. The site seems to be have been stationary for some time.

News from the V&A

The new Theatre & Performance galleries have now opened at the V&A.  Along with the opening of the galleries the web pages now feature more interviews and digitised material than ever before. Among the highlights are the entire contents of several original D'Oyly Carte Opera Company prompt books, used in Savoy Theatre productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operas in the late 19th Century.  You can see what's believed to be the pre-production prompt book of The Mikado (1885), as well as a later prompt for this work dating from the 1880s; Princess Ida; and two prompt books for The Pirates of Penzance.

Images and layout of the new galleries:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/galleries/103/index.html

In addition to this information on objects in our collections can be found by going to http://collections.vam.ac.uk/ and entering theatre & performance as a search term.

The V&A online library catalogue is now available via COPAC and provides Collection Level Descriptions of the majority of archives as well as information about prompt books, information files, books and manuscripts.

The Oscar Wilde Bookshop, New York

We thank those readers who drew our attention to the following news.

The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village, which is believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the country, closed on 29th March citing economic troubles. The store nearly closed six years ago, only to be sold and given a last-minute reprieve. It was opened in 1967 on Mercer Street by Craig L. Rodwell, who was influential in the gay rights movement. It later moved to 15 Christopher Street. Mr. Rodwell, who inspired owners of gay bookshops around the country and who helped organize the city’s first gay pride parade in 1970, died of stomach cancer in 1993. A store manager, Bill Offenbaker, bought the store, which was then sold to Larry Lingle in 1996.In 2003, after Mr. Lingle said he could no longer afford to keep the store open, Deacon Maccubbin, the owner of Lambda Rising Bookstores in Washington, agreed to buy the store and keep it afloat. In 2006, Kim Brinster, the store’s manager since 1996, became the store’s fifth owner. Ms. Brinster cited declining sales figures .

IV. on the Curriculum : Teaching Wilde, Æstheticism and Decadence.

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

V. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

This issue’s review section contains reviews by Saralinda Abitbol on Corin Redgrave’s De Profundis, Andrew Eastham on Philip E. Smith’s Approaches to Teaching Wilde, Tine Englebert on Salomé in Geneva, Bruce Bashford on Michael Robertson on Walt Whitman, Regenia Gagnier on Sheila Rowbotham on Edward Carpenter, Melissa Knox on Esther Rashkin on Unspeakable Secrets, John S. Partington on Deborah Mutch on English Socialist Periodicals, 1880-1900 and Annabel Rutherford on Catherine Maxwell on the Victorian Visionary Imagination

These can be seen by clicking .

Last issue’s review section contained reviews by Rainer Kohlmayer on Florina Tufescu on Wilde’s plagiarism, D.C. Rose on Wilde’s Women of Homer, Mary Warner Blanchard on David Weir on Decadent Culture in the United States, Anya Clayworth on Anne Humpherys and Louis James on G.W.M. Reynolds, John S. Partington on Graham Johnson on Social Democratic Politics in Britain and Barbara Wright on Eric Karpeles on Proust.

These can be seen by clicking .

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

VI. OSCAR WILDE AND THE KINEMATOGRAPH

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

There have been previews of Oliver Parker’s Dorian Gray, with Ben Barnes (Dorian), Colin Firth (Lord Harry), Rebecca Hall (Sibyl Vane), Ben Chaplin and Rachel Hurd.

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

Posters

This month’s posters were found for us by Danielle Guérin.  After appearing here, these are posted on their own page, called POSTERWALL, gradually building up a gallery that will make the images more accessible than by searching the Internet.  It was updated in March 2009, and can be found by clicking the icon.

VII. LETTERS FROM OUR EDITORS

LETTER FROM IRELAND

Aoife Leahy

Our ‘Nineteenth Century Popular Literature’ panel at the NAES ‘Europe in Popular Literature’ symposium, hosted in IADT Dun Laoghaire on the 28th of February, took us back to the 1890s. Dr Deaglán Ó Donghaile (NUI Maynooth) contributed a paper entitled ‘The Voice of Dynamite: Anarchism and Late Nineteenth Century Popular Literature.’ Texts under discussion included Richard Henry Savage’s The Anarchist. Dr Ó Donghaile also researches Wilde and joked about The Importance of Being Earnest’s explosion of Bunbury at question time. Deaglán pointed out that Miss Prism’s capacious handbag could have contained a bomb instead of a baby, like many a bag left in a railway station! Sarah Crofton (TCD) contributed a paper entitled ‘Moving Bodies: Consumerism and Disease in Tourism Fiction of the Fin de Siécle,’ comparing Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian. Dr Eve Patten chaired the session.

Ciara O’ Hara, an Irish artist who brings Victorian influences such as William Morris to her work, is amongst the exhibitors at the ‘Unfinished Business’ exhibition at The Sycamore Gallery, 9 Sycamore St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. The exhibition opened recently on February 26th. Many of O’ Hara’s works featuring beautifully drawn or sculpted birds remind me of Wilde’s story ‘The Happy Prince.’ ‘Metamorphosis II’ juxtaposes a dead bird with black and gold wallpaper and has a fin de siécle feel to it. The works on display can be viewed at http://www.twomb.com/print-collective.

Few people seem to have read Dorothy L. Sayers’ short story ‘The Travelling Rug.’ The story is a very amusing reworking of Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ and begins with the mystery of a stained hearth. It is not a Peter Wimsey tale since Sayers invented a new female detective, the housemaid Jane Eurydice Judkins, for a domestic investigation. Like Wilde’s Virginia, Judkins is a fearless and unconventional young woman. ‘The Travelling Rug’ was unpublished during Sayers’ lifetime but the manuscript ended up in the Wade Centre, Wheaton College, Illinois. A 2005 edition by the American based Mythopoeic Press includes a facsimile of Sayers’ handwritten manuscript. ‘The Travelling Rug’ can be purchased on www.amazon.co.uk.

Rae Smith was awarded Best Costume Designer in The Irish Times Theatre Awards in March for her work on the Abbey Theatre’s production of An Ideal Husband last summer.

We also draw readers’ attention to the forthcoming conference ‘Ireland and the fin-de-siècle’. See below.

LETTER FROM LATVIA

Ilze Kačāne

27th February 2009

Dear Colleagues,

This is the first letter from Latvia. First, I apologize to those who are expecting a thrilling and all-embracing account of the cultural events taking place in Latvia. I really hope my future letters will be of another format. But the first one is meant to say something that offers an insight into what we, the Oscholars (official and unofficial) in Latvia, are and what we actually do. For this reason, the letter seems more a factological material than an epistle. Anyway, I hope some of you may find it useful.

Oscar Wilde in Modern Culture

Theatre

On 15th February 2008 the premiere of David Hare’s Drama ‘The Judas Kiss’ took place in Latvian National Theatre calling forth a great resonance in the society. It was much discussed in different critical reviews before and after the performance (in mass media, TV, radio) and always remained sold out. This year it is still in the repertoire of the Latvian National Theatre, the closest dates of the performance are 19th February and 7th March.

Cast:

Oscar Wilde	Juris Lisners
Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosy)	Uldis Anže
Robert Ross	Gundars Grasbergs
Arturs Velslijs	Mārtiņš Brūveris
Fībija Keina	Evija Skulte
Sendijs Mofāts	Jānis Skanis
Galileo Maskoni	Jānis Āmanis

Directed by Dž. Dž. Džilindžers (Daile Theatre), stage designed by Kristaps Skulte, costumes by Ilze Vītoliņa, choreography – Inga Krasovska, lights – Mārtiņš Freimanis. Text translated by Raimonds Rupeiks.

Interesting is the fact that Juris Lisners, the performer of Oscar Wilde’s role, at the end of 2008 was nominated the best actor of the season.

Oscar Wilde and British Writers in Academic Circles

Scientific Conferences and Seminars

On 29th-30th January 2009, the international scientific conference ‘XIX Scientific Readings’ took place at Daugavpils University, Latvia. Among 247 participants from eleven countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan) several researchers in the working group ‘Animals in Literature and Culture’ delivered reports on the representation of animals in Victorian literature and culture:

Irina Presņakova (Daugavpils, Latvia) : Representation of Animals in Victorian Ghost Stories

Jelena Brakovskaja (Daugavpils, Latvia) : ‘Imundus habitator’ in Works by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.

Ilze Kačāne (Daugavpils, Latvia) : ‘Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Pleasure, a Madness’: Australian Exotic Animals in Victorian British Culture

Jelena Semeneca (Daugavpils, Latvia) : Animals in Arthur Machen’s Novel ‘Terror’

Mārīte Opincāne (Rēzekne, Latvia) : From Human to Animal – Degradation of Personality under the Influence of Darwinism Ideas in the Novelette ’Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad

The reports delivered during the conference will be published in the collection of articles ‘Cultural Studies’ in January, 2010.

On 5th-7th March 2009, at Liepāja University the 15th International Scientific Conference ‘Current Issues in Researching Literature’ will take place. Mārīte Opincāne from Rēzekne Higher Education Institution will deliver a report ‘Biblical Mythology in Joseph Conrad’s Sea Prose’.

Planned Scientific Activities

On 3rd-4th April 2009, Daugavpils University Faculty of the Humanities Institute of Comparative Studies is organizing scientific conference ‘Sherlock Holmes and Others: Semiotics and Poetics of the Detective Fiction’. Application deadline is the 20th March. For more information please contact Anna Stepiņa: anna.stepina@du.lv

Since not so many people in Latvia are aware of the creative writing by Gyles Brandreth (Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders, Oscar Wilde and the Ring of Death) during my presentation I will try to analyze the two books. In my next letter from Latvia I hope to give detailed information on other reports delivered during the conference that might be of any interest to the Oscholars.

On 23rd September 2009 Daugavpils University Faculty of the Humanities Institute of Comparative Studies is organizing scientific conference devoted to Alfred Tennyson’s 200th anniversary. More detailed information will follow. Contact person: Ilze Kačāne ilze.kacane@du.lv.

Published Papers (January – February, 2009)

In January 2009 the first number of the collection of scientific articles ‘Cultural Studies’ was published by Daugavpils University Faculty of the Humanities:

Stašulāne A., galv. red. Kultūras studijas. Personvārds kultūrā. Zinātnisko rakstu krājums. I. Daugavpils: Daugavpils Universitātes Akadēmiskais apgāds ‘Saule’, 2009, 404 lpp.

(Stašulāne A., chief ed. Cultural Studies. Person Name in Culture. Scienitific Papers. I. Daugavpils: Daugavpils University Academic Press ‘Saule’, 2009, 404 pages.)

In the collection, the papers presented during the international scientific conference ‘XVIII Scientific Readings’ that took place at Daugavpils University, Latvia on 24th-25th January 2008 are presented. The researchers focussed on the analyses of person names in varied national literatures, including the usage of anthroponyms in Victorian literature:

Jelena Brakovskaja (Daugavpils, Latvia) : The Proper Name in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Prose

Summary (p. 90)

The article investigates the essence of a proper name as one of the main elements of the language that carries an essential cultural load. The proper name is a text-building factor in Le Fanu’s prose. Each proper name in his novels and stories contains special information concerning the whole culture and can serve as the basis for a specific association. Moreover, proper names, being texts in themselves, are considered to be symbols of Le Fanu’s epoch. The symbol, being an integral part of the mental process, influences the readers’ interpretation of the context.

Ilze Kačāne (Daugavpils, Latvia) : The Personal Name ‘Virginia’ in the 19th Century British Literature: Anthroponomy of Oscar Wilde’s Prose

Summary (p.72)

Names of human beings or anthroponyms in British writer Oscar Wilde’s (1854–1900) poetic world often have special meanings. The semantic analysis of the anthroponyms shows that the personal names in literary works are not only related to some private or public events in the author’s life, but they also demonstrate the specifics of literary characters, reveal the philosophical conceptions of the ‘literary icons’ mentioned in the text, and act as symbols.

A wide spectre of Victorian Britain personal names, which in the majority of cases are used in an ironic meaning, are offered in Wilde’s collection of stories Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891). The portrayal of the main character Virginia in the story The Canterville Ghost has been formed based on the contrasts of the opposites ‘typical – atypical’. The person name ‘Virginia’ perfectly describes the young girl as a loner who, similarly to the mystical ghost, is included in the category of idealism and irrationalism in contrast to the prevailing rationalism and pragmatism. The typical and religious associations of the person name ‘Virginia’ with purity, innocence, and spiritual world are used in Wilde’s story to single out the different and the individual among the common and the alike that prevail in the utilitarian and pragmatic world of the 19th century Britain.

Mārīte Opincāne (Rēzekne, Latvia) : Person Names and Place Names in Joseph Conrad’s Sea Prose

Summary (p. 162)

The real name of the English writer Joseph Conrad is Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski.

Many protagonists of J. Conrad have real historical prototypes – the people whom he has met during his sea voyages, about whom he has heard in different ports of the world and read in different journey descriptions and ship journals. The name of the character often becomes a sign. Many of J. Conrad’s place names are often based on the authentic geographical places. Several protagonists by J. Conrad are his own biographical protagonists, in this way expressing J. Conrad’s own ideas. An unusual literary technique is used in the novelette The Heart of Darkness where only two protagonists have names but the others have only functions. To make the voyages and exotic countries more attractive to the reader, J. Conrad uses exotic persons’ names and place names. They attribute more mysterious atmosphere to the writing.

During the 15th International Scientific Conference ‘Current Issues in Researching Literature’ that will take place at Liepāja University a collection of articles from the last year conference will be presented. The paper by Ilze Kačāne ‘A Perfect Gentleman’: Dandyism in Oscar Wilde’s and Anšlavs Eglītis’ Poetic World will be published.

Summary

A man as a poseur and dandy enters the artistic world of the Latvian writers of the first half of the 20th century under the influence of the 19th century foreign authors. The concept of ‘dandyism’ in Latvian literature is most intensively favoured by the examples of French and English literatures, as well as by the extraordinary personalities of the authors representing them. One of the borrowings in Latvian literature is closely related to the synthesis of the British writer Oscar Wilde’s (1854–900) personal pose and the one of his literary heroes – dandies and poseurs. For Wilde, dandyism is a part of aestheticism; the author’s literary characters are most often represented in his works as aesthetes and dandies. According to Wilde, a dandy not only places particular importance upon physical appearance and affects extreme elegance in clothes, but he also cultivates sceptical reserve and extraordinary behaviour, creative oral self-expression and aesthetic environment.

Literary characters dandies are brightly depicted in Latvian writer Anšlavs Eglītis’ (1906–1993) poetic world. The model of Eglītis’ human conception is genetically tied to the dandy characters of Wilde’s literary works, who strive for a beautiful and comfortable life. Eglītis’ dandy characters create themselves thus declaring a self-cultivated personality and announcing the ironic notion of a ‘perfect gentleman’.

The report is an attempt to single out the common and the different in the representation of both writers’ dandyish characters. Special attention is devoted to the comparison of some literary images (a dress, a detail of the dress, a mirror, a flower in buttonhole), which are the emblems of the dandyism phenomenon.

PhD Theses on the way

Daugavpils University Faculty of the Humanities Doctoral degree study programme ‘Literary Studies’ (including two branches –’Comparative Literary Studies’ and ‘History of Foreign Literature’) is designed to prepare highly qualified teachers and researchers. As a former student of this study programme (PhD Thesis 'The Reception of Oscar Wilde's Prose in Latvia (till 1940)' defended in November 2007) I would like to let you know that several PhD Theses of my colleagues are on the way:

Irina Presņakova : ‘English Ghost Stories from 1860s to 1880s’ (planned to be defended in 2010)

Jelena Brakovskaja : ‘Charles Robert Maturin – Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Paradigms of the Gothic Consciousness’ (planned to be defended in 2011)

Mārīte Opincāne : ‘Joseph Conrad’s Sea Prose’ (planned to be defended in 2011)

Miscellaneous

At the end of 2008, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday by Gilbert Keith Chesterton was published in Latvia in the framework of the ‘Golden Classics’ series. (Gilberts Kīts Čestertons. Cilvēks, kurš bija ceturtdiena. Translated from English by Maija Apine. Rīga: Zvaigzne ABC, 2008.)

Though Charles Darwin falls outside specific themes of the Oscholars, one should not forget his great influence on many of Victorian writers and artists. On February 9, 2009 Latgale Central Library (Daugavpils) opened the exhibition ‘Cilvēks un daba’ (‘Human and Nature’) dedicated to British nature investigator Charles Darwin.

Letter from Sweden

Tijana Stajic

February 2009

Greetings from Sweden to all of the Oscholars! I am pleased to have a chance to communicate news on our common passion for Oscar Wilde and related matters. Wilde and fin de siècle continue to attract scholarly attention as well as popular interest in Sweden. An important contribution to the fin de siècle literature in Sweden is Emil Kléen’s (1868-1898) newly published novel Venus Anadyomene, discovered at the manuscript section of Lund University in 2006, and edited by David Almer, who has been recently published extensively on Kléen. Dealing with the bohemian and mysterious Sten Helmer, believed to be modelled after Kléen himself, the novel embodies decadent themes of self-destruction, (existential) anxiety, and isolation. Deeply influenced by the fin de siècle aesthetics, Kléen, who was sometimes considered to be the Swedish flâneur par excellence, read authors such as Swinburne, Huysmans, Verlaine, and translated Charles Baudelaire into Swedish. Ola Hansson, another Swedish fin de siècle intellectual, affected Kléen through his articles on the turn of the century Europe. Featuring a tension between pastoral nostalgia and the anxiety of modern life, Kléen’s poetry was anthologized in collections such as Weekend and Parish (Helg och söcken) (1893), Wild Wine and Poppy (Vildvin och vallmo) (1895), Ripe Summer (Mogen sommar) (1896), Mrs Margit. A Love affair (Fru Margit. Ett kärleksäfventyr) (1896) and Collected Poems (Valda dikter) (1907), posthumously published with a preface of the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, often associated with the fin de siècle aesthetics. (For more information, please check http://www.nittondestolen.se/2009/01/kleens-ateruppstandna-dekadens-ar-en-besvikelse/).

Strindberg’s own preoccupation with (existential) anxiety remains even more relevant for Swedish audience, and so his “A Dream-play” (Ett drömspel”), an allegorical quest play from 1901/02, commonly considered a predecessor of dramatic expressionism, has been this time set by Måns Lagerlöf at “Östgötateatern” in Linköping. Dealing with a tension between social laws and individual ethics, Lagerlöf’s production of “A Dream-play” features crucial historical episodes from our contemporary era and unfolds as a review of the 20^th century as a historical nightmare. (For more information, please check http://www.svd.se/kulturnoje/scen/artikel_2423093.svd).

Besides Kléen’s Venus Anadyomene, another novel inspired by decadent spirit, which awakens a new interest in Sweden, is Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Characterized by George Orwell as “brilliant sketches of a society in decay”, the novel has been recently translated by Leif Janzon and published by Lind & Co. Recounting Isherwood’s experiences in Berlin in the 1930’s, this piece is, according to Mikaela Blomqvist writing for a Gothenburg daily newspaper “Göteborgs posten”, fit for a reader aiming “to indulge his intellectual capacity in decadence”. (For more information, please check http://www.gp.se/gp/jsp/Crosslink.jsp?d=404&a=474044).

VIII. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CONFERENCES & CALLS FOR PAPERS

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

LATE ENTRY: We also draw your your attention to the New York Symposium Æstheticism and Decadence and Mark Samuels Lasner’s Washington DC Lecture Wilde’s Presentation Copies. Details are on our April CONFERENCE page.

Ireland and the Fin De Siècle. Conference: Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th September 2009, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. The Call for Papers is now closed, and we will publish the programme as soon as we receive a copy.

‘British Æstheticisms’ are the subject of a conference being organised by Bénédicte Coste and Catherine Delyfer at the University of Montpellier in October 2009. The programme is now on line: see www.esthetismes.com. This offers a wonderful chance of a gathering of fin-de-siéclistes in the celebrated university town in the south of France.

.

The Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes (http://www.sfeve.paris4.sorbonne.fr/) is inviting contributions for issue number 72 (October 2010) of its journal Les Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (http://www.cervec.org/) devoted to the Theatre of Oscar Wilde, edited by Marianne Drugeon, @. The Call for Papers closed on 30th March. Again, more information will be published by us when we have it.

IX.  OSCAR IN POPULAR CULTURE / WILDE AS UNPOPULAR CULTURE

The following was taken from a website or blog identified as Marikay4, which seems to have disappeared. We would be grateful if anyone who knows more will communicate with us.

Oscar Wilde

Stats:
Date of Birth: April 2nd 2005
Loctation: Colorado
Adopted parent: In my personal care

Story:
Oscar Dolly has just been born and already he's been stunning everyone with his outstanding wit and conversation. He's ventured forth to school with me and really enjoyed meeting everyone. He's looking forward to his upcoming adventures, like going to Ireland to see the town of his birth.

Alcohol taken in sufficient quantities (3):
The Wilde Restaurant is situated in the Westbury Hotel, Grafton Street, Dublin, not far from Trinity College.

A 2008 Topps Allen and Ginter Baseball Card of Oscar Wilde is one of Wilde’s odder manifestations.

X. OSCAR WILDE: THE VIDEO

Our video this month is a very short clip from a Chinese version of ‘The Happy Prince’. We would be glad to hear from any readers who would like to join our editorial team with the specific task of exploring Youtube and any similar website and compiling a systematic list of videos.

XI. 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 new update is in the course of preparation and has been partially completed. A Table of Contents has been 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.

Oscholars can visit a site created by ‘The Oscar Wilde Fan Club’ on http://www.oscarwildefanclub.com/home.asp. The home page offers the services of Dublin actor Patrick Walsh as a lecturer on themes and talks connected with Oscar Wilde. Patrick Walsh can be contacted on patrick@oscarwildefanclub.com. The site remarkably asserts à propos Wilde’s second trial ‘The Judge Justice Wills before passing sentence described it as the worst trial he had ever tried. It later emerged that in fact the judge was homosexual. History has proven that an Irishman does not get Justice in an English Court.’

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works of Oscar Wilde

This Hyper-Concordance is written in C++, a program that scans and displays lines based on a command entered by the user. The main advantage of the C++ program is that it not only identifies the concordance lines but the words occurring to the left and the right of the word or phrase searched. It also reports the total number of text lines, the total word count and the number of occurrences of the word or phrase searched. The full text of the book is displayed in a box at the bottom of the screen. Each line of the text is numbered, and the line number and the term(s) searched provide a link to the full text. The Hyper-Concordance displays two pull-down boxes. The user can first choose one of a selection of authors from the box and then one from a list of the author's works. There are four limiting options displayed before searching: case sensitive, non-alphabet character sensitive, head length and tail length. The searcher can also ascertain the book's total word count and vocabulary distribution by searching without a query. This web-based KWIC concordance (Key Word in Context) offers a clear survey of Victorian literary texts. Windows 2000/XP and the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer are recommended for the best and quickest viewing of the Hyper-Concordance website. Macintosh users are warned that it can take some time to run the concordance program.

The Concordance, part of Mitsu Matsuoka’s great contribution to Victorian Studies on the web, can be found by clicking here.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click  .

XII. OGRAPHIES

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

NEWS FROM THE Royal Historical Society Bibliography, Irish History Online AND London's Past Online

Move to new server. The Bibliography has been moved to a new server which should give faster searching.  The web address remains as before so there is no need to update your links or favourites.

New search box on browsable indexes. On the browsable indexes of names, journal or series titles and indexing terms, we have replaced the A-Z links with a search box that you can use to search for a particular term in the list. You can read more about the browsable indexes in our help pages.

Other news. We plan to carry out the next data upgrade later in the spring.

Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History -http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl; Irish History Online - http://www.irishhistoryonline.ie/; London's Past Online - http://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/lpol/

The Royal Historical Society Bibliography is based at the Institute of Historical Research: http://www.history.ac.uk. We welcome comments, suggestions and feedback at http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/docs/feedback.html, or by e-mail to simon.baker@sas.ac.uk.

XIII. Mad, Scarlet Music

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

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

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

XV. THE OSCHOLARS COLOUR SUPPLEMENT

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

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

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

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

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

The second issue of this journal of Ruskin studies has been published 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 new issue, and issued a Call for Papers for the third. THE EIGHTH LAMP: Ruskin Studies To-day will shed much light in new places, and places Ruskin studies firmly in conjugation with Wilde studies.

The Latchkey

After various teething problems, the first issue of THE LATCHKEY, a journal devoted to reporting and creating scholarship on The New Woman, has now been published. The co-editors are Jessica Cox, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Sophie Geoffroy, Kathleen Gledhill, Lisa Hager, Christine Huguet and Claire O’Callaghan.

Ravenna

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

Rue des Beaux Arts

The nineteenth issue of our French language journal under the dedicated editorship of Danielle Guérin was published in March 2009. 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 (now edited by Tiffany Perala vice Mark Llewellyn) and Vernon Lee (edited by Sophie Geoffroy) are published as material is accumulated. We recommend joining their mailing list for alerts. A new issue of The Sibyl has been completed and was published in February. In December the transfer was completed of all the early issues of Shavings from our former webpages at www.irishdiaspora.net to www.oscholars.com..

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 was published in the autumn. We are now calling for papers for a Spring issue. VISIONS is co-edited by Anne Anderson, Isa Bickman, Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, Tricia Cusack, Nicola Gauld and Sarah Turner. NOCTURNE, our journal devoted to Whistler and his circle, is now being incorporated into VISIONS.

XVII. Acknowledgments

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

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