An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Vol. IV

Nos. 4-9

Issues no 35-41: April-September 2007

EDITORIAL PAGE

oscholars@gmail.com

Jennifer Pohl : Reading Dorian Gray (Portrait of the Artist’s Sister)

Prívate collection, Oil on Canvas; © Jennifer Pohl, and reproduced here by kind permission of the artist.

Jennifer Pohl has a website at http://www.spaceabovethecouch.com and is represented by the Christina Parker Gallery, 7 Plank Road, St. John’s, NL, Canada A1E 1H3. Web: http://www.christinaparkergallery.com. Email: @.

Navigating THE OSCHOLARS

Clicking takes you to the Table of Contents; clicking takes you to the hub page for our website; clicking takes you to the home page of THE OSCHOLARS.

The sunflower navigates to other pages of this issue.

We do not usually publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form. This replaces our earlier sign , with which we were never satisfied.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Click on any entry for direct access
I. The Editorial team	1. The AHRC and the AHDS	10. Awards	XIII. GOING WILDE: Productions
II. News from The Editor	2. Vienna World Theatre	X. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS	XIV. SHAVINGS
III. RICHARD ELLMANN TWENTY YEARS ON	3. The Viennese Café	XI. NOTES AND QUERIES	XV. WEB FOOT NOTES
IV. THE OSCHOLARS APPENDICES	3. Reading and Literary Discussion Groups	1. Oscar Wilde and Robert Service	XVI. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY
V. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS	4. Exhibitions	2. Oscar Wilde at Oxford	XVII. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY
VI. NEWS FROM READERS	5. Society News	3. Dorian Gray	XVIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Charles Carpenter
The London Adventure	6. Conferences, Seminars, Lectures	4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph	XIX. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?
VII. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	7. Dublin Gay Theatre Festival	5. Wilde on the Curriculum	1. The Oscar Wilde Society
VIII. PUBLICATIONS & PAPERS	8. Museums & Galeries: Threats & Promises	6. Whistler	2. The Société Oscar Wilde
IX. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE	9. Work in Progress	8. Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain	3. The Oscar Wilde Society of America
To top of column 2	To top of column 3	To top of column 4	4. Other Wilde associations

1. THE EDITORIAL TEAM

Up until now we have listed our team in this section. Rather than continuing to repeat this endlessly, we have transferred the list to its own page, and this can be reached by clicking the Maréchal Niel: .

In our last issue we announced that our Editorial team had been joined by the leading Spanish Wilde scholar Dr Cristina Pascual Aransáez of the Camilo José Cela University, Madrid. We can now add with great pleasure that we have been further strengthened by the appointments of Dr Tina O’Toole of the University of Limerick, Dr Kirsten MacLeod of the University of Alberta and Ms Dúnlaith Bird of the University of Oxford. Although Wilde was not a feminist in any sense that we would recognise to-day, he did believe that women’s voices should be heard in intellectual debate, and this was his aspiration when he edited Woman’s World. In keeping with our commitment to explore the avenues of exploration of the fin de siècle that open up from a central space given to Wilde, we are introducing a section called at least to begin with as a working title Yellow Aster, chiefly addressed to recording contemporary scholarship on the New Woman; and it will be Dr O’Toole’s project and that of her two assistants, Ms Yvonne O’Keeffe and Ms Louise Sheridan, to keep us informed about this. It is a development that also honours Lady Wilde, Speranza, as a distinctive voice among nineteenth century women.

Dr MacLeod joins us as Associate Editor for Canada, and we hope that we will thus be able to increase our knowledge of fin-de-siècle studies (as well as exhibitions and plays) taking place in that country. Thirdly, we have recruited Ms Bird as our Associate Editor for Oxford, where the presence of Oscar still looms. Ms Bird, who is completing her doctorate at St Catherine’s College, is Convenor of the Oxford Fin-de-siècle seminars, and so very well placed to inform us about lectures, plays, societies, and other events taking place in the city and university.

Information that falls within the spheres of influence of each of our Associate Editors (news of publications, papers, conferences, productions, and requests for review copies etc) should be sent to the appropriate AE for processing and onward transmission to the Editor.

The work of the AEs in undertaking this, as well as in obtaining new readers for THE OSCHOLARS is invaluable, and the compliments that are quite often directed to the Editor are properly theirs as well as his.

2. News from the Editor

This is the third issue of THE OSCHOLARS to be originated on our new website, provided and constructed by Steven Halliwell of The Rivendale Press, a publishing house with a special interest in the fin-de-siècle. This website when complete will house all our publications and archives as a fully navigable, searchable and sophisticated resource. 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.

Much of our archive has now been transferred to the new site, although it has been this work and the construction of the website as the home for our family of journals and webpages that has delayed the publication of this issue of THE OSCHOLARS, making a hold-all issue necessary. We will continue to get as much up as quickly as possible.

Innovations

The first two of our planned special, once-off, special features, are in train. The first of these goes on-line this month, October, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde; the guest editor for this is Dr Michèle Mendelssohn of the University of Edinburgh.

For more information, and a link to its page, click

Our quarterly devoted to Vernon Lee (The Sibyl), under the editorship of Sophie Geoffroy (Université de la Réunion) is now fairly launched with two issues on line, and we have launched the first issue of Moorings, a quarterly devoted to George Moore and his circle, edited by Mark Llewellyn of the University of Liverpool. These, with further issues of our French language sister publication rue des beaux-arts, edited by our Associate Editor for French Cultural Affairs Danielle Guérin, are now posted at www.oscholars.com and all future issues will appear there.

Taking advantage of the possibilities of the website, we have also introduced a page called NOTICEBOARD, serving all our journals, where we will happily publish short term announcements of publications, papers and other ítems of interest submitted by readers. This does not replace notice in any of the journals, but is intended to be of value between issues.

NOTICEBOARD is at .

The other special issue, to be published next Autumn, is on Teleny. We believe it is high time that scholarship on Teleny is brought together and the arguments about it properly marshalled. 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, in the first instance outlining their approach. @

A further special is planned for 2009, on Oscar Wilde’s stories for children. We will announce the guest editor shortly, but initial expressions of interest in contributing can be sent to oscholars@gmail.com.

A further new page is called . Here we will gather the theatre information that was hitherto scattered through our different sections – click its colophon to reach it. This is part of our reconstruction, allowing THE OSCHOLARS itself to focus more narrowly on things Oscarian. Again, we believe that it will make for economy of effort coupled to impact of effect if our monthly SOCIETY PAGE now has a permanent place: see .

Discussion and announcements forum

What will probably be our final innovation until all has bedded down is the recreation of a correspondence page. Your editors have discussed at length the form that this should take: our old JISCmail service never functioned fully. We considered trying to revive it, or creating a listserv as H-Fin-de-siècle, or a blog. While none of these are ruled out for the future, it was eventually decided to set up a group with Yahoo, which despite its unattractive name and often unattractive material, is familiar to most people, and easy to operate and govern. We have laid down fairly strict guidelines for postings, and we hope that it will avoid acquiring some of the useless baggage that is a characteristic of some of these groups.

The forum was set up for us and initially moderated by Colleen Platt, a committed Wildëan and experienced moderator. Unfortunately pressure of other commitments has led her to step down from the position of moderator, although we hope she will take this up again in the future. The task is taken up by Dr Mark Llewellyn and myself. Our model is VICTORIA, and we hope to stimulate the same sort of scholarly discussion, although with a different emphasis encompassing all the concerns of our journals, and the fin-de-siècle in its broader aspect internationally. It is also be a very convenient way of making announcements that fall between issues of THE OSCHOLARS (supplementing NOTICEBOARD), or to herald the arrival of the new issues. As only subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS and its sister publications will able to contribute, we hope for some serious debate.

We do urge all our readers to sign up for this, even if only to ensure they get regular news by this means. All (including the rules for submission) can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/oscholarship. There is a short registration process, as there is for all such groups and lists. If you set your preferences either to digest or to individual e-mails, this will overcome one problem for us, for at the moment sending e-mails to all our subscribers is a very long business, with so many mailboxes not accepting mass mailings. All possible steps will be taken to exclude spam, advertisements for dubious services, and irrelevant postings. We will sprinkle its link here and there in our pages, where we think readers may (or should be) prompted to express a view. The icon is .

THE OSCHOLARS is therefore developing well along the lines previously laid down. Its international scope is being extended and its reviews section will be much enlarged. Oscar Wilde will always at the centre of our concerns, of course, but by covering in greater depth the epoch we call the fin desiècle, we reveal Wilde’s essential stage setting and, we hope, augment his place within it.

THE OSCHOLARS is composed in Bookman Old Style, chiefly 10 point. If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you can adjust the size by using the text size command in the View menu. The same is true for Firefox and it may be the same for Netscape.

THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY

· We invite readers who have published articles on Wilde in anthologies or journals that are not readily accessible outside university libraries (and not always then) the opportunity to republish them (amended if desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website. We have recently been putting 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 from which you can link to each article. There are also links to French language articles similarly republished in rue des beaux-arts.

Newly posted to LIBRARY:

Jeremy Barris: Oscar Wilde's Artificiality and the Logic of Genuine Pluralism.

Richard Dellamora: Bataille/ Wilde: An Economic and Aesthetic Genealogy of the Gift.

Donald R. Dickson: ‘In a mirror that Mirrors the Soul’: Masks and Mirrors in Dorian Gray.

Isabel Fraile Murlanch: Taking risks: A reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Samuel Lyndon Gladden: ‘Sebastian Melmoth’: Wilde's Parisian Exile as the Spectacle of Sexual, Textual Revolution.

Adrian Pablé: The importance of re-naming Ernest? Italian Translations of Oscar Wilde.

B. de Sales La Terrière: Magdalen College and Oscar Wilde.

Patrick Sammon: Oscar Wilde and Greece.

Kenneth Womack: ‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

· This offer is also extended to abstracts or précis of unpublished doctoral theses. In either case, these must come as e-mail attachments or on diskette, formatted in Word, or .pdf. In the case of articles, the name of the anthology or journal, its volume and number, place and date of publication, and indication of revisions if any must be given; in the case of the latter, the date of the doctoral award, the university, and the name of the supervisor must be given. This is a development of our republishing short pieces in 'And I? May I Say Nothing?'

· Should the author so wish, access to the article or thesis can be by password only, provided by the author at the request of the intending reader. In this case, the author can decide whether she or he will charge for the password before giving it. If such a charge is made, we will look for a commission of 10%. Otherwise, we will maintain freedom of access.

· All work so published will remain copyright to the author.

· We also intend republishing older articles on Wilde, made obsolete by the march of scholarship, that may still have some value in charting how he was viewed by earlier writers.

New postings will be announced on our discussion forum

3. RICHARD ELLMANN TWENTY YEARS ON

This month marks the anniversary of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. Following an idea by Trevor Fisher, we commissioned an assessment of Ellmann from this now fairly lengthy perspective. This assessment, Revaluing and Re-evaluating Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, has been guest edited by Michèle Mendelssohn of the University of Edinburgh, at the suggestion of Maud Ellmann, and has contributions from Mary Warner Blanchard, Trevor Fisher, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Melissa Knox, Mark Samuels Lasner, Michèle Mendelssohn, Christopher Nassaar, Peter Raby, S. I. Salamensky, Neil Sammells, Philip E. Smith, John Stokes, and Gulshan Taneja. The layout and design is by Steven Halliwell.

This assessment with notes on the contributors and a bibliography compiled by Danielle Guérin, Lucia Krämer, Cristina Pascual Aransáez and D.C. Rose, can be found by clicking the picture of Richard Ellmann above. We are extremely grateful to Dr Mendelssohn for her work in putting this together; and the contributors for responding to the call.

4. THE OSCHOLARS APPENDICES.

It is now possible to view on their own pages a number of Tables and material gathered from different issues of THE OSCHOLARS in Appendices. A guide to these is below, or click here to go its cover page. The Appendices are:

a. The Amalgamated Table of Contents for The Wildean.

b. The Wilde Calendar and the Wilde Chronology.

c. In Table form, a list (needing to be updated and reformed) of all the books and plays and exhibitions that we have reviewed, together with a list of the essays that have appeared in 'And I? May I Say Nothing?'. To reach it, click wherever you see this icon

d. All the material published in the monthly section 'Web Foot Notes' has now been brought together one page called 'Trafficking in Strange Webs'. Monthly reviews will continue as before and these will be added to the total. To see this page, click

e. Our Poster Wall of film posters, gathered from the section ‘Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph’, is to be found in its own similar folder. Click its icon to reach its Contents page.

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. Underlined text in blue can be clicked for navigation through the document or to other addresses.

We continue to expand our readership and have made up the numbers lost during our period of suspension. Some 1500 people now receive our alerts for the posting of new material on to our site.

5. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS & CORRESPONDENCE

Guidance for Submissions and Correspondence is on its own page where it can be consulted by clicking here. Remember that our correspondence section can be reached by clicking .

6. FREQUENTING THE SOCIETY OF THE AGED AND WELL-INFORMED: NEWS FROM READERS

The London Adventure

We regret that our publication delays make this more of historical interest than a guide to some very enjoyable explorations. We will in future be able to bring more up-to-date announcements, either here or on our Noticeboard.

The LONDON ADVENTURE

EXPLORATIONS INTO HIDDEN LITERARY LONDON

www.thelondonadventure.co.uk

CALENDAR OF WALKS

2007

May 12th ………….. DION FORTUNE

June 9th …………… NORTH SOHO 999

June 23rd …………. ARTHUR RIMBAUD

July 14th …………… JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER

September 16th ……. PATRICK HAMILTON – A BRIGHTON ADVENTURE

October 21st.……… JOHN MINTON

All walks are free

After each walk there will be a collection for voluntary donations to

The London Adventure Children’s Fund

FURTHER INFORMATION

The information given here is correct at time of publication. For further information and updates on London Adventure walks and The London Adventure Children’s Fund, and to be on the mailing list, please contact Nicolas Granger-Taylor at the address below, or visit the website.

CONTACT

Nicolas Granger-Taylor, 35 Grafton Way, London W1T 5DB

Tel: 020 7387 7942 Mobile: 07791 029 770

Email: @

FORTHCOMING

THE LONDON ADVENTURE

A volume of essays on London literary figures by London Adventure walk leaders

AUBREY BEARDSLEY by Alexia Lazou ○ ALEISTER CROWLEY by Mark Pilkington

CHARLES FORT by John Rimmer ○ ARTHUR MACHEN by Nicolas Granger-Taylor

EDWARD HERON-ALLEN by Joan Navarre ○ BARON CORVO by Bryan Welch

ARTHUR SYMONS by Antony Clayton ○ MICHAEL ARLEN by Mark Valentine

SAX ROHMER by Antony Clayton ○ PATRICK HAMILTON by Marc Glendening

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS by Bill Redwood

7. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

Last month’s review section contained reviews by Neil Sammells of David Haven Blake: Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity; by Grace Brockington of Talia Schaffer: Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, to which Dr Schaffer has written a response.

These reviews may be found be clicking

This month we carry reviews by

Marie-Noelle Zeender on Oscar Wilde in Paris

Lucia Krämer on Oscar Wilde from first to last

Angela Kingston on Oscar Wilde in Dieppe

Chiara Briganti on Decadence and Masculinity

Paula Murphy on Augustus Saint Gaudens

These reviews may be found by clicking

Clicking will take you to the Table of Contents of all our reviews, although this needs updating.

We welcome offers to review from readers.

8. PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

<< More than half of modern culture depends upon what one should not read >>

For a list of recent and forthcoming publications and papers (with abstracts of the latter when available), click

9. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE

Concerning AHRC withdrawal of AHDS funding

On the 14^th May 2007 the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) publicly announced its intention to withdraw funding from its digital service provider, the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) from March 2008. The announcement is available on:

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/news/news_pr/2007/information_for_applicants_to_AHRC_june_deadline.asp

An initial response by AHDS is available at:

http://ahds.ac.uk/news/ahrc-news-may07.htm

The AHDS Homepage outlining their full range of services is available at:

http://www.ahds.ac.uk/index.htm

For reasons outlined below this action severely threatens UK based arts and humanities digital research and development and has now developed to the stage of petitioning the Prime Minister to request AHRC to reconsider their decision. The petition is available at

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/AHDSfunding

Only British citizens and those resident in the UK are permitted to sign the petition but international colleagues may choose to send emails to the appropriate authorities outlining the detrimental effect this action will cause to UK and international arts and humanities digital research, learning and teaching.

Please feel free to cross-post this request as you feel is appropriate.

Weltbühne Wien: The Reception of Anglophone Plays on Viennese Stages of the 20^th Century

Funded by the Austrian Research Council, this interdisciplinary project investigates the reception of Anglophone plays on Viennese stages during the twentieth century. Particular emphasis is placed on exploring the processes of cultural transfer involved and examining elementary questions relating to play selection and censorship, the constructions of national stereotypes and identities in the course of the reception process, as well as to drama translation and adaptation. Moreover, due consideration is given to the historical role of individual theatres and theatre directors, agents and translators acting as ‘cultural mediators’.

The project, directed by Professor Ewald Mengel at the Department of English and American Studies, involves members of four different departments at the University of Vienna, including English and American Studies, Comparative Literature, Translation Studies and Theatre, Film and Media Studies, and has by now established international ties with the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

The members’ individual projects cover an extensive variety of issues. The range includes three full-length studies on the Viennese reception of such classic playwrights as Shakespeare, Shaw and Wilde, as well as contributions on various aspects of cultural transfer, censorship, transcultural theatre and stage translation.

More information on the project, which will be accompanied by an international conference in May 2008, can be found at www.univie.ac.at/weltbuehne_wien. Two of our Associate Editors, Barbara Pfeifer and Sandra Mayer, are involved in this project.

The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture Research Project

Not a million miles from the above, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England, this multi-disciplinary project investigates the lasting significance of the Viennese café. The unique dynamism of Viennese culture at the beginning of the twentieth century was manifested by the innovations of its artists, writers, composers, designers, psychoanalysts and scientists. The city’s famous cafés played a crucial part in this vibrant intellectual and artistic environment. Here pursuits of refreshment, communication, leisure, work, and intellectual exchange co-existed, challenging conventional boundaries between public and private life.

Research will focus on the historical, cultural and artistic complexity of the Viennese café as an urban space in order to better understand the culture of cafes, both past and present. Attention has long been focused on Paris as a cradle of modernity and artistic modernism. Through its focus on the Viennese café, this project aims to redefine our understanding not only of the arts in Vienna, but also of modernity and modern life more generally.

The project is run jointly by Dr Tag Gronberg and Dr Simon Shaw-Miller in the Department of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College, University of London and Prof. Jeremy Aynsley in the Department of History of Design at the Royal College of Art.

More information on the project can be found at www.rca.ac.uk/viennacafe. We will be covering this carefully, from both the London and the Vienna ends, and are grateful to the organisers for their co-operation.

Reading and Discussion Groups

This groups are monitored as charting a largely non-academic audience for the literature of our period. The discussion in most groups is usually lively, often informative, sometimes artless, and remains in the on-line archive of each group. It is interesting to see which books are chosen by more than one group, and taken together they form a sort of extra-university anti-canon. A subject for research one day, perhaps?

18th19th Century Novel.

This group announced the reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray in June; and Alice In Wonderland in October (other books fall outside our period). It can be found at http://groups.Yahoo.com/group/18th19thCenturyNovel. The group is a very lively one with 213 members, up from 206 lats spring.

The Nineteenth Century Literature Group

This describes itself as ‘a forum for people who enjoy the literature of the 19th century and includes works from all countries. List members participate in group reads and discussions which are not limited to the current selections, and are actively encouraged to recommend other authors or books and to discuss all facets of the 19th century.’

Its schedule is currently (March) Armadale by Wilkie Collins, to be followed by Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Knut Hamsun’s Pan; followed by (August 26th): The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton; (September 23rd): The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith; (October 7th): Esther Waters by George Moore; (November 4th): Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott; (November 18th): Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach.

The group has 327 members.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/19thCenturyLit/

Epoque Victorienne Anglaise En Lisant

This French language group, once very active in discussing British Victorian literature, has languished recently, but is currently being revived. It can be found at

http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/EpoqueVictorienneAnglaiseEnLisant/. It has 20 members.

French Literature

This is the counterpart of the above, an active English language discussion group of French literature, heavily weighted towards the 19thc. The February book was Mademoiselle de Maupin (83 messages), that for March La Terre, followed in April by Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century. No books from our period are scheduled beyond these.

It can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrenchLiterature/ and has 155 members.

English Literature, Culture, and Society 1880-1920

This group ‘is dedicated to the sharing of information and ideas about any and all aspects of British, North American and European literature, culture and society in the four decades 1880-1920.’

Formerly run from the University of Toronto by Greg Grainger, this has been for the last few years in charge of Rachel Bright (Temple University). The group’s archives to June 2006 can be found at http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/elcs-l.html and a subscription can be effected from that page or by contacting the list owner. There were no postings between June and December last year, and this year there have only been sxiteen postings, almost all announcements, in the last six months. ELCS is perhaps overshadowed by the VICTORIA group, where the few conference and other notices that ELCS does carry can also be found, and might really be considered in abeyance were it not that the collapse of the mailing system from the U.Penn calls for papers make it the more valuable.

The Poetry of Thomas Hardy

This is an offshoot of the Thomas Hardy Association. Each month a new poem is discussed. Users have to subscribe in order to participate. To subscribe, please go to the Thomas Hardy Association website:

http://www.yale.edu/hardysoc/Welcome/welcomet.htm

Click on the Poetry Discussion Group button, and then fill in the simple form provided. Once you have subscribed, you will automatically receive all POTM messages and will be able to contribute to the discussions via email.

The April poem was ‘The Five Students’; that for May, ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’; for June, ‘Voices from Things Growing in a Churchyard’. September was ‘Going and Staying’.

British Studies

NWCBS (North Western and Western Canada British Studies Group) is a low-traffic, non-commercial list for scholars, professors and researchers in British Studies who are located in the Northwestern United States and Western Canada. Members are encouraged to join the North American Conference on British Studies.

Subscribe: NWCBS-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Post message: NWCBS@yahoogroups.com

Unsubscribe: NWCBS-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Margaret DeLacy, List moderator.

Bookies Too

Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George in May; Silas Marner in August; nothing on our period after that as yet. 934 members.

See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BookiesToo

TBRBookstoshare

This group read The Bostonians by Henry James in September, but though the schedule to the end of 2008 is published there are no further books from our period. Discussions start on the 18th of each month. If you'd like to join or learn more about the group, please visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TBRBookstoShare/

Classic Books

Conrad’s The Secret Agent in June; then (1^st October) The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux and (1st November) Dubliners by James Joyce. One can join this group at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Classic_Books/. 302 members.

Timeless Tales

Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady was read in May, but for the monet the group is not active. See http://groups.msn.com/TimelessTales/_whatsnew.msnw

British Classics

This group will be reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins in May; Hardy’s The Return of the Native in and The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, in August; after that no books from our period until June 2008, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and
July 2008 The Portrait of a Lady. 134 members. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/British_Classics/

ClassicGothicHorror

This group reads and discusses one classic gothic horror book each month. ‘Authors include but are not limited to Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Horace Walpole, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charles Maturin, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Matthew Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving and others. We choose our books through nominations and polls.

(Note: this group does not deal with the modern definition of gothic, goth or the goth lifestyle, nor do we discuss vampires in any connotation outside of these novels.)’

The schedule includes (September): Lois The Witch by Elizabeth Gaskell and in 2008 (January) The Ghost Pirates, by William Hope Hodgson; (June) At Creighton Abbey & Other Horror Stories, by Mary Elizabeth Bradden; (August) The Witch of Prague,by F. Marion Crawford; (November) The Black Robe by Wilkie Collins

The group has 123 members. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClassicGothicHorror/

Exhibitions

We believe the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle have been under-represented in THE OSCHOLARS. We now are greatly extending our exhibitions and publications listings and will commission reviews when possible in tandem with those on the writers of the period. This section has its own page, reached by clicking

Society News

We do not wish this list to be anglocentric and welcome information about similar organisations in all countries, although French societies are chiefly listed in rue des beaux-arts. News of Societies and Associations are on their own page, and links to the Societies' own websites are included; new ones are added each month. All have been updated. Theatre societies now to be found in our new section .

Societies on our Society page are listed are

Hero Societies
1. The Louis Couperus Society	10. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society
2. The Stephen Crane Society	11. The Octave Mirbeau Society
3. The Michael Field Society	12. The William Morris Society
4. The Ford Madox Ford Society	13. The William Morris Society of Canada
5. The A.E. Housman Society	14. The William Morris Society of the U.S.A
6. The J.-K. Huysmans Society	15. The John Ruskin Societies
7. The Henry James Society	16. The Robert Louis Stevenson Societies
8. The Arthur Machen Society	17. The Edith Wharton Society
9. The George MacDonald Society	18. The Emile Zola Society
19. The Association of Literary Societies
Subject Societies
1. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings	7. The Eighteen-Nineties Society
2. The Irish Association of Art Historians	8. The Furniture History Society
3. The Scottish Society for Art History	9. The Association of Historians of Nineteenth Century Art
4. The Arts & Crafts Society of New York	10. The Pre-Raphaelite Society
5. The Bedford Park Society	11. The Victorian Society
6. The Decorative Arts Society	12. The Victorian Society in America

Click to reach The Society Page.

We welcome news from all Societies whose remit covers the period 1870-1900, or perhaps beyond: the long fin de siècle. We will also be happy to publish their journals’ Tables of Contents if sent as e-mail attachments to oscholars@gmail.com.

Conferences, Seminars, Lectures

As with the Calls for Papers we maintain this on its own page as a rolling list, adding and subtracting each month. News of Conferences, Seminars and Lectures for inclusion should be sent to our Associate Editor responsible, Dr Florina Tufescu.@

Conferences, Seminars and Lectures in this issue:

1. Fin de Siècle Studies at Oxford

2. Oscar Wilde: Putting Music into Words

3. Oscar Wilde Conference at Oxford

4. 19th Century Group at UCLA

5. Victorian Literature & Culture at Harvard

6. Arts & Crafts

7. Midlands Victorian Conference, Birmingham

8. Augustus Saint-Gaudens

9. Ford Madox Ford

10. William Morris

11. Irish Women Writers

12. Hungarian Society for Irish Studies

13. Council for European Studies

The page can be reached by clicking

We used to draw readers' attention to the list of lectures taking place in London compiled by Ben Haines at www.indiana.edu/~victoria/lectures.html. This link no longer responds, but the list still exists as part of the Victoria Research Web (click the banner) at http://victorianresearch.org/lectures.html. No lectures on our period or subjects are currently listed as forthcoming.

The Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.

Inaugurated in 2004 during our period of suspension, the Festival takes place during the first full fortnight of May each year with the 2007 dates being 7th to 20th May. The festival is for men and women of all ages, regardless of their sexual orientation. For more information click the Festival’s banner.

The William Morris Gallery; the Wellcome Library; the John Rylands Library

The ill-news of the closure of London’s theatre museum is matched by similar worrying news about the William Morris Gallery. We here republish the editorial by Florence Boos in the William Morris Society’s Newsletter, July 2007.

This is one of my sadder letters, for the William Morris Gallery in Lloyd Park, Walthamstow--the only public museum which has hitherto preserved Morris' works and an extensive range of Pre-Raphaelite artifacts--is under attack from the councilors of the Borough of Waltham Forest.

Ignoring offers of financial help from the Friends of the William Morris Gallery, the Council has cut the Gallery's hours, imposed gag-orders on its staff, terminated the contracts of its long-time curator Peter Cormack, his deputy Amy Gaimster and attendants Tim Foster and James Mason, and announced its intention to merge the Gallery's administration with that of the Borough's Vestry House Museum,

These actions negate the possibility of successful applications to upgrade the Gallery's premises and make it more accessible to disabled visitors. Few of the Council's decision-makers seem to have visited the Gallery or viewed its extensive collection of drawings, books and manuscripts in recent years, but several have expressed interest in the site's value as a potential revenue-producing venue for meetings and weddings.

Located in the house Morris' family occupied from 1848 to 1856, the Gallery has for many years now housed displays of rugs, fabrics, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, stained glass and painted tiles designed by Morris and others who together founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company in 1861.

It has also given shelter to arts and crafts furniture, textiles, ceramics and glass created by Arthur H. Mackmurdo and the Century Guild, William De Morgan, May Morris, Ernest Gimson, George Jack, C.F.A. Voysey, Selwyn Image and others between 1880 and 1920, as well as prints, drawings and paintings by Pre-Raphaelites and other Victorian and early twentieth-century artists such as Frank Brangwyn. The Gallery's library has housed rare books, drawings and manuscripts by Morris, and much of the library of his first biographer, J. W. Mackail. So extensive are its holdings that the curator has had to admit one scholar at a time to study them in its small space, and opponents of the cuts have good rea-son, I believe, to fear that the councilors plan to disperse or if possible sell some or all of these irreplaceable resources.

In response to all this, "Friends of the William Morris Gallery" organized an initial protest last January, another on Morris' birthday in March, and a third in May in which several hundred opponents of the cuts marched to the Waltham-stow Town Square and declared its Town Hall a "crime scene." They have also created a web site with news and information about ways to help, and we urge members to sign a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/savewmg/ and visit http://www.keepourmuseumsopen.org.uk.

There are forty-four councilors, whose addresses are all publicly available at at www.lbwf.gov.uk. Those most responsible for the cuts seem to be Adam Gladstone, Clyde Loakes (the Council's head), and Geraldine Reardon, the representative for the William Morris Ward and its newly appointed minister of "leisure, arts and culture."

Elaine Ellis, a member of our governing board who has organized many visits to the Gallery, has written to Mr. Loakes that ‘you have rushed into the ill-advised decision to [lay off or 'reassign'] the staff of the William Morris Gallery . . . without any relevant information and then [sought] to justify it on the basis of making this institution more accessible. . . One can only say, “Sir, have you no decency?” Members of your own community, members of the arts community, and the many friends and supporters of the William Morris Gallery stand ready to work with you if you are sincere and if you rescind your completely ill-advised actions.’

We urge all who read these words to express their views to the councilors, who can be reached via mail at

Waltham Forest Town Hall
Forest Road
London E17 4JF UK

and by e-mail to

Adam.Gladstone@walthamforest.gov.uk
Clyde.Loakes@walthamforest.gov.uk
Geraldine.Reardon@walthamforest.gov.uk

and collectively

http://www.walthamforest.gov.uk/wmg/home.htm

Better news comes from the Wellcome Library which has moved back to its historic home at 183 Euston Road, re-opening there on Monday 16th April. Full details can be found on the website at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk. Moreover, in Manchester, ‘after a £17m facelift, general visitors are welcomed back to the Deansgate building of the John Rylands Library where the exhibition galleries will be re-opened.’ The refurbishment of the neo-Gothic library is said to be ‘stunning’, giving us to understand that the facelift refers to the building and not to the general visitors.

Work in Progress

In December 2006 we published a list of fin-de-siècle doctoral theses being undertaken at Birkbeck College, University of London. We should very much like to hear from readers who teach at other universities with news of similar theses they are supervising. We also welcome all news of research being undertaken on any aspect of the fin de siècle.

Thomas Wright is currently researching the subject of Oscar Wilde’s reading and would gratefully welcome any information on the current whereabouts of any books formerly belonging to Wilde. He would also be interested in any curious or obscure information relating to books Wilde read and to his reading habits generally. Contact him at @.

Given the somewhat tenuous association between Wilde and the anarchists (despite his declaration of sympathy for anarchism), we note here the work of Dr Anat Vernitski of the University of Essex who is involved in an on-going project to study members of the Friends of Russian Freedom and various English and Russian figures linked to them (1880 - 1917), having so far published an article and a book chapter on this topic:

Vernitski, A. 'Russian revolutionaries and English sympathizers in 1890s London: the case of Olive Garnett and Sergei Stepniak', Journal of European Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3, 299-314 (2005)

Vernitski, A. 'The Complexity of Truth: Ford and the Russians', pp. 101-111, in Skinner, Paul (ed.) Ford Madox Ford's Literary Contacts, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.

Readers might like to follow this up, especially in view of the acquaintance of Shaw with Stepniak, on our discussion forum . Dr Vernitski may be contacted at @

Awards

Since January 2007 this section has been transferred to its own page.

To reach it, please click .

We welcome news of awards offered for any aspect of the period 1880-1914.

10. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS

This section has its own page. To reach it, please click . We hope these Calls may attract Wildëans.

Any specific papers on Wilde will be noted in future issues of THE OSCHOLARS. Here we draw your attention particularly to the call for papers for an Oscar Wilde Conference in Oxford being arranged by Stefano Evangelista at Trinity College, and to this Call for articles for a Special Issue of Modernism/Modernity on British Decadence/aestheticism and modernism from Professor Cassandra Laity.

I am calling for submissions for a special issue on British Aestheticism (or Decadent/Aestheticism) and modernism of Modernism/Modernity (14.5, September 2008). Submissions may treat any aspect of Aestheticism and its relation to modernism and/or the formation of 20th-century ‘modernity.’ The field is open, but topics such Aestheticism and/or decadence and Victorian visualities, technology, architecture, or science in 19th-century painting, poetry, literature as they ‘interface’ with related phenomena and art in modernism are welcome.

Deadline: 1st February 2008.

Send by attachment to: <claity@drew.edu> and <tdiefenb2002@yahoo.com> or by post to Prof. Cassandra Laity, Department of English, Drew University, 36 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940.

We have arranged with Professor Laity to publish abstracts of the articles submitted to this special issue of Modernism/Modernity.

Calls listed this month are:

Louisa May Alcott	Imaginary friends	Bohemias
Ford Madox Ford	Irish Childhood	Æstheticism and/or Decadence
Elbert Hubbard	London	Domestic objects
Henry James	Memories	Exile
Florence Marryat	Murder	Silver Forks
Oscar Wilde (1)	Picture Books	Time
Oscar Wilde (2)	Politics & Propaganda	Underworlds
Mrs Henry Wood	Women & Crime	Women & the Occult

11. NOTES AND QUERIES

« Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are. »

Oscar Wilde : the Poetic Legacy

In our last issue, to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Brendan Behan, we republished his poem Oscar Wilde, in the translation by Ulick O'Connor from Behan's Irish. This month we republish this poem by Robert Service. We have taken our courage in our hands as we do not know to whom we should have applied for copyright permission.

I dreamed I saw three demi-gods who in a cafe sat,
And one was small and crapulous, and one was large and fat;
And one was eaten up with vice and verminous at that.

The first he spoke of secret sins, and gems and perfumes rare;
And velvet cats and courtesans voluptuously fair:
‘Who is the Sybarite?’ I asked. They answered: ‘Baudelaire.’

The second talked in tapestries, by fantasy beguiled;
As frail as bubbles, hard as gems, his pageantries he piled;
‘This Lord of Language, who is he?’ They whispered ‘Oscar Wilde.’

The third was staring at his glass from out abysmal pain;
With tears his eyes were bitten in beneath his bulbous brain.
‘Who is the sodden wretch?’ I said. They told me: ‘Paul Verlaine.’

Oh, Wilde, Verlaine and Baudelaire, their lips were wet with wine;
Oh poseur, pimp and libertine! Oh cynic, sot and swine!
Oh votaries of velvet vice! . . . Oh gods of light divine!

Oh Baudelaire, Verlaine and Wilde, they knew the sinks of shame;
Their sun-aspiring wings they scorched at passion's altar flame;
Yet lo! enthroned, enskied they stand, Immortal Sons of Fame.

I dreamed I saw three demi-gods who walked with feet of clay,
With cruel crosses on their backs, along a miry way;
Who climbed and climbed the bitter steep to which men turn and pray.

Oscar Wilde at Oxford

Douglas Sladen, who went up to Oxford on the same day as Wilde (but to Trinity College), tells how Wilde ‘began his æsthetic poses when he was at Oxford, but his fellow undergraduates at Magdalen put him under the college pump because they were so ashamed of him.’ (Douglas Sladen: My Long Life, Anecdotes and Adventures. London: Hutchinson 1939 p.44.) Is there any other source for this tale, so much at odds with the Benson story of Wilde throwing hearties down the stairs? Or was Sladen confusing Oscar at Magdalen with Robbie Ross at King’s?

See also the article by B. de Sales La Terrière in our LIBRARY .

Dorian Gray

Brett Kolles writes

I am a graduate student writing my Master's Essay on Oscar Wilde, with a focus on Lippincott's Monthly Magazine and its decision to print the first edition of Dorian Gray. DG was first run in the July, 1890 publication of Lippincott's. I have read several reports that state the periodical sold quite well but I have been at a lost to find verifiable proof of this. I am specifically looking for circulation numbers (print run), although I would also be interested in the number of actual subscribers Lippincott's had before and after DG release. I have been in contact with several libraries and universities but have as of yet received but moral support. To give a firm basis for my thesis, I would like to have monthly circulation numbers for the year 1890 for Lippincott's. Any information, or suggestions, would be greatly appreciated.

We will forward any replies to Mr Kolles.

Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph

Posters

This section, in which we are displaying film posters, began in April 2003. 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 on the icon

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

Wilde on the Curriculum

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, George Moore and Vernon Lee} is also welcome.

Sue McPherson writes

I teach Dorian Gray as part of a course called 'Experiments with Realism: British Fiction 1840-1900' at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. We consider Wilde's novel in relation to his other prose writings, reading the novel in terms of shifts in narrative form and genre during the Victorian period [...]I have found, as usual, students find Eliot difficult. They all love Jane Eyre, North and South and The Moonstone. They do not read Dickens, enjoy Hardy, love Wilde and cope with Moore and Conrad.

Catherine Frank (University of New England) writes

I have only a short unit on Legends, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy in a course that draws heavily on one I took with Judith Plotz as a graduate student several years ago. I do teach Wilde's "The Happy Prince." For the students who have taken my Victorian class–in which we read Dorian Gray as well as some criticism on its construction of criminality and aesthetics–the fairy tale shows the overlap between his fiction for adults and children. For others in the class, for whom in fact it may be the only English class they take, we focus discussion on the tale as socialist text and/or as aesthetic response to capitalism. I think in future I might reframe it as a response to muscular christianity which we actually discuss in a later unit on school stories e.g. Hughes.

Even as I write I'm thinking of some other ways to go about teaching him, so thanks again for letting me know there will be some new scholarship.

Whistler

The names of Whistler and Wilde being inextricably linked, we devoted a good deal of space to Whistler in his centenary year of 2003. This monthly section developed its own page called Nocturne. We have been editing and collating the material, and Nocturne will form a permanent supplement to THE OSCHOLARS, where any new information on the Whistler will be published, as well as exhibition and book reviews. This will be mentioned in future Notes & Queries under Whistler, with a link to Nocturne, into which it will then be incorporated. Elaine Saniter from the University of Glasgow is nowAssociate Editor with responsibility for developing this page, and information should be sent in the first instance to her. @

Notice of three exhibitions and an article were posted in February 2007.

To see Nocturne, click

A Wilde Collection

There is no universal handbook or vade mecum to the various Wilde Collections, and we plan to make 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 hope then to be able to bring these together as a new Appendix.

In our January 2007 edition we published a description of the Wilde Collection (Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection) now in the University of Leeds. Joseph Donohue subsequently sent us this note:

I note the information about the Elliott gift of Wilde manuscripts to Leeds. One of them, the 1883 manuscript of The Duchess of Padua, figures in a central way in the edition I have just completed of this play for the Oxford English Texts edition of the complete works. This is the first of several plays in a group that I'm in the process of editing for the OET Wilde. Fortunately, several years back, Fay Elliott allowed me to make a transcription of the 1883 Duchess manuscript. It is as the catalogue entry has it. An article of mine about the 1883 private printing of the play, based on the manuscript of the same year, is forthcoming in The Wildean.

Also forthcoming in The Wildean is an article on the failed production of the play by E. W. Godwin, who tried in late 1884 to get a production of it up at the Olympic, but something happened and it never materialized. Godwin's production book, made on a copy of the privately printed 1883 edition, is now in the Duke University Library.

The most important Wilde collection is that of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California - Los Angeles, to which Wilde scholars are so greatly indebted. The holdings are well represented on the web, and the URL http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf338nb1zb will bring you to the relevant page.

The Library of the University of Reading in England houses the Sherard Collection, and we described this in some detail in our last issue.

The chief Wilde holdings in the Bodleian Library at Oxford are those of the Robert Ross collection. A guide to these was published by the late Andrew McDonnell in a limited edition of 170 copies, of which two are in the Bodleian itself, and one in Magdalen. Other copies are presumably in the British Library, Trinity College Dublin etc. We are curious about the whereabouts of others. As far as we can make out, this catalogue is not published on line, but would welcome confirmation of this.

Details:

McDonnell, Andrew. Oscar Wilde at Oxford: an annotated catalogue of Wilde manuscripts and related items at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, including many hitherto unpublished letters, photographs & illustrations. Oxford: [A. McDonnell], 1996 48 p. : ill., facsims., ports. ; 30 cm.. Limited ed. of 170 copies. Compiled by Andrew McDonnell.

Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain

Carson Flanders is a writing a novel where his character finds a first edition Twain, inscribed to Wilde, with various implications. Mr Flanders is curious about whether there was any connection at all between the men. The biographies of Wilde that we have consulted suggest not, itself slightly odd. Does any reader know more? We will pass on any information to Mr Flanders.

12. 'MAD, SCARLET MUSIC'

This section is compiled by our Assistant Editor for Music, Tine Englebert of the Rijksuniversiteit Gent, Belgium, who welcomes contributions and observations. @

To go to the 'Mad, Scarlet Music' page, click .

13. GOING WILDE

This section also has its own page especially for it. To reach it, click

Contributions to this section of THE OSCHOLARS from anywhere in the world will be very welcome indeed. We will do our best to arrange reviews, and volunteers are sought. Complimentary tickets can usually be provided.

We thank those readers who have drawn our attention to many of these productions.

14. SHAVINGS

Our supplement Shavings (news of productions and publications on George Bernard Shaw, and of the Shaw Societies) has its own subsite as part of www.oscholars.com. Information for Shavings may be sent to Barbara Pfeifer of the University of Vienna @, and without usurping the functions of the many excellent Shaw sources that already exist, we hope we can complement Shaw studies in our way.

Reach Shavings 23 by clicking the picture of a cornet:

15. WEB FOOT NOTES

Our monthly look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as elsewhere. This feature will be updated in our next issue (October/November 2007).

All the material thus far published in the monthly 'Web Foot Notes' was brought together in June 2003 in one list called 'Trafficking for Strange Webs'. New websites will continue to be reviewed here each month, after which they will be filed on the Trafficking for Strange Webs page. A Table of Contents has been added for ease of access.

Each month we revisit these sites and our comments on what we find there are posted under the original entry. Thus, this month we have revisited the sites on which we reported in previous Marches and updated our reviews, also noting those sites that no longer exist or have fallen into desuetude.

‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’ surveys 48 websites devoted to Oscar Wilde.

The Société Oscar Wilde is also publishing on its website two lists (‘Liens’ and ‘Liaisons’) of recommendations.

To see ‘Trafficking for Strange Webs’, click .

To see ‘Liens’, click here.

To see ‘Liaisons’, click here.

Sites newly visited

We copy this from the Irish Diaspora list, 13th March 2007:

Forwarded on behalf of Aidan Arrowsmith. Subject: British Association for Irish Studies website.

Some of you will have noticed that, since before Christmas, we have been having major problems with our website. To cut a very long story short, our domain name, which we have owned for many years, was mistakenly sold by our hosting company, and despite protracted negotiations, it has proved impossible to buy it back.

As a result, we are taking the opportunity to overhaul the BAIS website with the aim of making it a genuine hub for Irish studies in Britain. We have a new address, www.bais.ac.uk and have already posted a redesigned, temporary site containing important information about forthcoming events, deadlines and contact details. Over the next few weeks and months, this existing site will be thoroughly expanded to include a wide range of information, which we hope will be of great interest and use to you.

In the meantime, please do visit www.bais.ac.uk - and update your bookmarks!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde is (obviously) the Wikipedia address for Oscar Wilde. The long entry is sound enough, though besprinkled with small errors (‘Sir Edward Clark’ … ‘’The Reverend Stuart Hedlam’ … ‘Chief Justice Sir Alfred Wills’) and is sometimes rather naïvely written. We have little experience of Wikipedia, and do not know how the article rates by its usual standards.

16. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY

Our guide to Wilde and other items for sale and related bookshops, has its own page .

Booksellers may like to note that we are very happy to post news of items for sale between catalogue times, and of course we will carry any items for sale or wanted by readers. Our discussion group can also be used for immediate communication.

17. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY

The Calendar is a day by day record of events concerning Wilde, originally monthly published in THE OSCHOLARS from July 2001 to June 2002.

Corrections and additions are anxiously sought and will be published here with acknowledgments before being added to the Calendar.

We have now also designed this as a Chronology, where the events are given in sequence. We thank John Cooper for suggesting this.

To go to the Calendar, click here; to go the Chronology, click here.

18. BIBLIOGRAPHy

Although we occasionally published bibliographies from our early days, it was only in February 2003 that brief bibliographies of works chiefly concerning Wilde but also dealing with wider aspects of the fin-de-siècle beagn to appear regularly. These are in a simple form as references, rather than detailed lists in a bibliophile sense.

A new bibliography is published here each month, with a brief guide to the bibliographies previously given. Each is subsequently posted in an Appendix, reached by clicking

New items are regularly added to the lists.

One of our original bibliographies was published in May 2002, when Irina Istratescu (University of Bucharest) very kindly supplied a list of Wilde's translations into Romanian In February 2003 we published a list of works on Wilde by Rainer Kohlmayer (University of Mainz) and by Rita Severi (University of Verona), and in March 2003 we listed the articles on Wilde by the late Jerome Buckley as well as a list of articles on Wilde published in English Literature in Transition. In April 2003 to coincide with a list of books wanted by Mosher Books, we added a list of Wilde's works published by the original Mosher firm. In May 2003 we began a bibliography of The Importance of being Earnest, to which we hope readers will contribute.

June’s bibliography was of the writings on Wilde of H. Montgomery Hyde. As always, we welcomed additions and corrections, and thanked Alfred Armstrong (Frank Harris webmaster) for drawing our attention to H. Montgomery Hyde's introduction to Frank Harris: Mr and Mrs Daventry (Richards Press, 1956), which contains a brief history of how it came to be written.

In July 2003, Linda Wong (Hong Kong Baptist University) provided a list of recent articles in Chinese journals, to which we added a few other titles linking Wilde and the Middle Kingdom.

Dr Wong's own 'The Initial Reception of Oscar Wilde in Modern China: With Special Reference to Salome' (Comparative Literature and Culture 3, Hong Kong September 1998, pp.52-73) is republished by kind permission in THE OSCHOLARS Library.

The August 2003 bibliography was of the publications of the Eighteen Nineties Society, which from its inception promulgated a significant publications programme of books and pamphlets. In September 2003, we published a bibliography of Arabic translations of Wilde, generously compiled for us by Christopher S. Nassaar (American University, Beirut). No such bibliography has been compiled before now. In October 2003, we decided to mark the production by Adrian Noble of A Woman of No Importance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London, with a bibliography of articles, but found only two devoted to this play. We are certain that there must be more! We padded this out with six articles on An Ideal Husband.

Our first issue of THE OSCHOLARS revived (October 2006) saw a bibliography (also lamentably short) for A Woman of No Importance. The November/December issue for 2006 was a bibliography of the writings on Wilde and his period by Professor Nassaar, together with an opening list of medical writings. In January 2007 we extended our range by publishing the first complete bibliography of the writings on late 19thc French art of Professor Gabriel P. Weisberg. This was in part to flag our increasing coverage of the fin-de-siècle as the context or background to Wilde’s contribution to literature and criticism, but chiefly of course to acknowledge the contribution of Professor Weisberg to the lesser explored areas of the period. This was published with the full and generous co-operation of Professor Weisberg himself, and will be kept up-to-date. In February we published a first list of articles on The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

This was followed in March by a bibliography of the works of J.P. Wearing, kindly provided for us by Peter Wearing himself. Although Wilde has not been Professor Wearing’s chief interest, his work on late 19th / early 20th century theatre will be familiar to all Wilde scholars and is essential reading on the subject. This month we draw readers’ attention to Wilde Play by Play: A Selective, Classified International Bibliography of Publications About the Drama of Oscar Wilde. This valuable work by Charles A. Carpenter of Binghamton University is complete (insofar as a selective bibliography can be complete) up to November 2005, and is available from the author @.

Here, courtesy of Dr Carpenter, we give the Table of Contents.

Page

Introduction 3

Sources Consulted 5

Abbreviations 6

Wilde’s Essential Writings and Statements Relevant to His Drama 7

Publications About Wilde’s Drama and Its Background

Collections of Essays 9

Bibliographic and Reference Works 10

Comprehensive, General, and Introductory Works on Wilde’s Drama 11

Selected Biographical Works 24

Selected Theatrical Commentaries 25

Wilde as Critic and Theorist 27

Commentaries on Individual Plays

“The Cardinal of Avignon” (Scenario) 30

The Duchess of Padua 30

A Florentine Tragedy 30

An Ideal Husband 31

The Importance of Being Earnest 33

Lady Windermere’s Fan 44

“Love Is Law” (Scenario) 48

Mr and Mrs Daventry (by Frank Harris, based on Wilde’s scenario) 49

La Sainte Courtisane; or, The Woman Covered with Jewels 48

Salomé / Salome 49

Vera; or The Nihilists 61

A Wife’s Tragedy 62

A Woman of No Importance 62

19. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?

This section, which has its own page, was originated for pieces too long for the Notes & Queries section but perhaps not quite substantial enough for articles in the print journals; or for ripostes. It may serve also as a notice board of early drafts, with comments invited; for papers given to conferences; for work that has been cut from articles elsewhere by unfeeling and purblind editors; or simply for work that we want to publish. Increasingly, we are giving space to articles submitted by our readers.

This section also contains occasional vanity publishing by the Editor.

In 'And I? May I Say Nothing?' in our lats issue we published The response by Talia Schaffer to Grace Brockington’s review of her Literature and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle; and, by kind permission, the abstract of a paper by Ellen Scheible, given at the 2007 American Conference for Irish Studies ‘The Gothic Sublime in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

This month we publish

– a short informal essay by Dr Lucia Krämer on the German versions of The Importance of being Earnest;

– the draft for a paper by Dr Kate Macdonald that was given at Varieties of Voice, the Belgian Association of Anglicists in Higher Education (BAAHE) annual conference, Leuven, 13th-16th December 2006 on ‘Orality and voice in John Betjeman’s “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel”: from the 1890s to the 1920s, and back again’;

– and six abstracts of papers dealing Irish women certainly known to, and possibly by, Oscar Wilde, given at the Conference ‘Irish Feminist Thought’. National University of Ireland, Galway, 13th-14th April 2007. This was convened by Dr Maureen O’Connor, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) Post-Doctoral Fellow, and Associate Editor of THE OSCHOLARS for Ireland.

To go to this month’s ‘And I? May I Say Nothing?’ click . See also the LIBRARY for articles republished from elsewhere.

We remind readers that original work may be submitted to The Wildean (see next item).

20. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY

THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

v v We welcome news from any Oscar Wilde group.

The Oscar Wilde Society

THE OSCHOLARS happily continues its cousinly association with the Oscar Wilde Society. A membership form which can be copied and printed is below. The Society now has its own website, www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk.

Donald Mead, Chairman of the Society, writes:

The Oscar Wilde Society is a literary society devoted to the congenial appreciation of Oscar Wilde. It is a non profit-making organisation which aims to promote knowledge, appreciation and study of Wilde's life, personality and works. It organises lectures, readings and discussions, including author's lunches and dinners, and visits to places in Great Britain and overseas associated with Wilde. The Society's Annual General Meeting is held in London, and the annual Birthday Dinner takes place at Simpsons-in-the-Strand, London. The Society's most recent events are reported in Intentions, the Society's newsletter.

The Society issues to its members a valuable print journal, The Wildean, and a Newsletter, Intentions, the costs of which are covered solely by membership subscriptions.

New members are very welcome. The current annual individual subscription (UK) is £20 and household membership £25. The rates for overseas membership are £23 (European postal area) and £28 (Rest of the World). Subscribers receive two issues of The Wildean and about six issues of Intentions each year.

Contacts for the Society are given below.

The Wildean

The Society's Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies–The Wildean–is published twice a year (in January and July). It is edited by Donald Mead, and the Reviews Editor is Dr Anya Clayworth. It contains features on a variety of subjects relating to Wilde, including articles, reviews and correspondence.

Over the years, a number of previously unpublished Wilde letters have been reproduced in facsimile, with commentaries, and the support received from Merlin Holland in doing this is gratefully acknowledged. The Wildean also publishes articles giving the results of research into a number of aspects of Wilde's life, particularly his lecture tour in the British Isles. Books of Wildean interest are reviewed as soon as possible after issue.

The Wildean is a publication of permanent interest (MLA listed and indexed) and copies of all back issues are available. Details from the Editor (see below). Librarians and collectors interested in acquiring sets are invited to contact the Editor for details of contents and prices.

Contributions to future issues of The Wildean are invited, both articles and shorter items— reviews, notes and correspondence. Guidelines for submissions are here given by Mr Mead, and articles should be sent to him at the address given below.

Editorial policy

The editorial policy of The Wildean is to publish studies of the life, works and times of Oscar Wilde and his circle. The aim is to print material which will interest Wilde specialists and also be accessible to general readers. Full-length articles, reviews, short items and correspondence are all welcome.

In addition to the publication of articles of scholarly interest, including those incorporating the results of new research, works about Wilde published in English are reviewed as soon after publication as possible.

Guidelines for contributors

The language accepted for publication is English. Any passages in other languages that may be quoted must be accompanied by an English translation.

It is the contributor's responsibility to seek any necessary permission to use copyright material.

Style guide: British norm. The Oxford Manual of Style (Oxford University Press, 2002) is very useful. Adjustments may be made editorially.

Footnotes are an interruption to the reader and should generally be avoided.

Endnotes should be used for documentation and citation of sources, not for extra expository material which is better incorporated in the text.

Suggested length:

Articles: 400 words upwards. 6,000 words, including notes, is the maximum.

Reviews: 300-1,000 words

Notes: 100-300 words.

Concision and clarity are sought. Articles of between 2,000 and 4,000 words are particularly favoured. Jargon should be avoided, and academic tone and analytical style moderated. Articles should hold the attention of the general reader.

Submission: Preferably, text in Word either on disc or by e-mail. Please do not incorporate footnote or endnote formatting. Alternatively, one typescript copy. Fax submissions cannot be accepted.

No submission fees or page charges are required.

Copyright ownership: individual contributors.

Rejected manuscripts returned if author requests (with s.a.e.)

Contributors

Contributors to recent issues have included many distinguished writers on Wilde, among them Anne Clark Amor, Simon Callow, Anya Clayworth (the Reviews Editor), Terry Eagleton, Nicholas Frankel, Jonathan Fryer, Sir David Hare, Anthony Holden, Merlin Holland, Joy Melville, Sir John Mortimer, Douglas Murray, Christopher Nassaar, Horst Schroeder, Matthew Sturgis and Thomas Wright.

The Wildean warmly welcomes contributions both from established writers and from new writers.

Intentions:

The Society's newsletter–Intentions–is published about six times a year. Edited by Michael Seeney, it gives information about the Society's forthcoming events, and details of public performances of Wildëan interest. New publications are noted–these may also be the subject of full reviews in The Wildean. Intentions also regularly prints illustrated reports of Oscar Wilde Society events and snippets of out of the way Oscariana.

The Wildean Tables of Contents.

THE OSCHOLARS has since we began published the Table of Contents for each new issue of The Wildean, and will continue to do so; in the months when there was no new issue, we published the Table from one or more of the earlier numbers. Thirty-one editions of The Wildean have now been published. Contents of the whole set is published by us as a combined list of Tables of Contents on its own webpage. The order is alphabetical: author, then of article; articles contributed pseudonymously by the late Bindon Russell have been identifed. Each new issue of THE OSCHOLARS carries a link to this Table by way of clicking on The Wildean logo, below. It can also be reached by a link from http://www.oscarwildesociety.co.uk/publications.html. On The Wildean’s ToC page can also be found a link to the ToC of the Wild about Wilde newsletter, now regrettably no longer published, compiled for THE OSCHOLARS by its editor and publisher Carmel Mc Caffrey.

A short descriptive piece by Donald Mead about each issue of The Wildean was published with the ToCs in THE OSCHOLARS and a table indicating in which issue these are to be found is given with The Wildean’s combined Table of Contents. We resumed this practice when we returned to publication after our exile from cyberspace.

The Wildean No. 30 was issued in January 2007 and we gave its contents in the February issue; the next issue is due in January 2008. The current issu, no. 31 was published in July. Of its contents, Donald Mead writes

Did Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud ever meet? No, but it would have been a memorable encounter. Might Freud, Wilde, Carlo Pellegrini, Bosie Douglas, and John Ruskin all have met in London in 1895? No, but ‘to give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.’ In The Wildean No.31 Peter Chadwick imagines such a meeting where a certain Count Ramberg makes startling offers to both Wilde and Freud. His playlet ‘Freud Meets Wilde’ is lively, entertaining and surprising, with many incidental insights into the minds of the protagonists.

Arnold T. Schwab’s article is the last of a three-part study, ‘Wilde and Swinburne’. Part I dealt mostly with Wilde’s debt to, criticism of, and comparison with Swinburne. Part II dealt almost entirely with Swinburne’s sexuality, marshalling the evidence of his homosexuality. Part III continues this examination, records his possible squib on Wilde, ‘When Oscar came to join his God … ’, and notes the difference between the two men.

Joseph Donohue is currently editing a group of Oscar Wilde’s plays, including The Duchess of Padua, for the Oxford University Press collected works edition. In ‘The First Edition of The Duchess of Padua’ he disentangles the complicated story of the place and date of the first printing of Wilde’s second play.

Joy Melville has recently published her biography of Ellen Terry, and her talk to the Oscar Wilde Society ‘Ellen Terry: A Victorian Enigma’ is published as an article in The Wildean. She made us realise just how famous and adored Ellen was. Oscar Wilde was a fervent admirer, writing sonnets in her praise. Their friendship was strong, and the veiled lady who left violets for him at the time of his trials is believed to be Ellen.

Horst Schroeder in ‘The “Two Early and Disastrous German Productions” of The Duchess of Padua’ takes issue with those who have uncritically adopted the account by Robert Sherard in his Life of Oscar Wilde of a very short-lived production of Wilde’s play, in a fine German translation, in Hamburg in 1904. Sherard described how a climax of misfortune was reached when an actor went mad on the stage and had to be removed to a lunatic asylum. Horst Schroeder puts the record straight, demonstrating that Sherard’s account is ‘a complete myth’: on the whole, the production did the play full justice, and the lack of success was actually the fault of the play. As Oscar remarked to Robert Ross ‘The Duchess is unfit for publication — the only one of my plays that comes under that category’.

Freemasonry played a significant part in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford days. In ‘The Wilde Oxford Mason’ Yasha Beresiner gives a detailed account of his Masonic activities, with the sad coda that in 1895, although Oscar had not been an any way involved with the Masonic fraternity for nearly two decades, his name was erased from the Golden Book of the Oxford University Chapter by order of the Supreme Council because he ‘has been sentenced to a term of imprisonment with hard labour.’

Michial D. Farmer Ii in ‘Throwing Inkwells with Martin Luther, Oscar Wilde and ‘The Sphinx’ observes: ‘Whatever other kind of writer Oscar Wilde may have been — aesthete, dandy, decadent, sexual theorist, wit, proto-deconstructionist — there is little denying that he was one of Victorian England’s most insightful and effective religious writers.’ His article shows that ‘The Sphinx’ was both a profoundly religious Catholic work and a poem about homosexuality — Wilde’s two great subjects.

In ‘Caspar Wintermans’ Defence of Bosie’ Thomas Wright finds Wintermans’ portrait of Douglas in his new biography intriguing and excellently drawn: ‘the gilt-mailed man boy rises up vividly from these pages’.

Michael Seeney considers Christopher Nassaar’s novel The Importance of Being Earnest Revisited. He found that although spotting the sources of the added witticisms was a frustrating parlour game, reading the book was a diverting experience, more satisfying than reading a bare play script.

Membership form (copy, paste and print)

Please print out this form and return it to
The Oscar Wilde Society, 19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England, with a cheque drawn on a British bank, payable to The Oscar Wilde Society.

Individual subscription (UK) is £20 and household membership £25.

The rates for overseas membership are £23 (European postal area) and £28(Rest of the World).

We can also accept (in cash, not by cheque) €35 Euros (for Europe) or $45 US dollars. (for USA). We welcome payment by standing order; for details, please send an s.a.e.

Your details: (please use BLOCK CAPITALS)

Name..................................................................................................... Address................................................................................................
Postcode ................…….................................
E-mail …………………………………………...
Telephone ..........................................................

Date …………………..............

TO 10/07

More information about the Oscar Wilde Society and details of membership may be obtained from Vanessa Harris, the Hon. Secretary (see below).

For more information about (and for) The Wildean (including availability of previous issues) and Intentions, please contact Donald Mead (see below).

The Oscar Wilde Society may be contacted by writing to

Vanessa Harris

Hon. Secretary, The Oscar Wilde Society

19 Southill Road, Gravesend, Kent DA12 1LA, England

e-mail: @

The Wildean and Intentions maybe contacted by writing to

Donald Mead

Chairman, The Oscar Wilde Society

Editor, The Wildean & Intentions

63 Lambton Road, London SW20 0LW, England

e-mail: @

La Société Oscar Wilde

This was founded in Paris in January 2006 by Emmanuel Vernadakis, D.C. Rose, Danielle Guérin and Lou Ferreira as the French branch of The Oscar Wilde Society, which all are urged to join. Its activities so far have included arranging group visits to Wilde productions and the creation of a bimestrial bulletin, called rue des beaux arts, of news, reviews and articles concerning Wilde and his French associates. This is edited by Danielle Guérin and six issues have been published, the last in December, the next due in February. At the moment its coverage is chiefly confined to metropolitan France, Wallonie and French Switzerland, but it is aimed at French speakers everywhere, and it is hoped that readers of THE OSCHOLARS will draw this to the attention of colleagues in Departments of French who teach the literature of the fin-de-siècle. Membership is free from melmoth@aliceadsl.fr and information about rue des beaux arts (which accepts articles in English as long as they have a bearing on Wilde in France or Wilde’s French circles, influence etc) can be obtained from the editor, Danielle Guérin @. Its archives, once housed with those of THE OSCHOLARS at www.irishdiaspora.net, have been transferred to www.oscholars.com. From time to time articles from rue des beaux arts will be translated into English and published in THE OSCHOLARS.

Issue no. 10 September/October 2007 is now on line and can be reached by clicking .

The Société Oscar Wilde is not to be confused with the Association des Amis d’Oscar Wilde, which also exists in France. We can say virtually nothing about its activities (save that it awards a literary prize more or less annually) as it discloses very little information about itself. Our application to join was not accepted.

The Oscar Wilde Society of America

<< The Oscar Wilde Society of America is an academic and literary society founded in 2002 to promote the study, understanding, and dissemination of research about Oscar Wilde and his times from the American perspective.

We are especially engaged in fostering a wider awareness of Oscar Wilde's 1882 American lecture tour, and the artists, educators, and other people he met on his tour across the continent. >>

Anyone interested in the OWSoA can make contact via the elegantly-designed web page http://www.owsoa.org/ or even http.owsoa.org (thus: without the www). This has replaced the former http://www.indstate.edu/humanities/owsoa.htm. Other contact addresses are below.

The officers of the Society are now given as

Marilyn Bisch, President, e-mail: marilyn@owsoa.org.

Dr. Donald Jennermann, Corresponding Secretary, OWSOA, University Honors Program, 424 North 7th Street, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA.

The webmaster is John Cooper.

While the Society is not at the moment undertaking activities, its website remains a valuable resource. An important feature is a well-designed and accurate Calendar of Wilde's engagements in America, edited by Marilyn Bisch. This can be found at http://owsoa.org/library/libraryhome.htm, replacing its earlier site at http://www.indstate.edu/humanities/owsoacalendar.htm.

We look forward to the Society’s return to activity.

Other Wilde Associations, past and present:

a. Project Oscar Wilde

This is the organisation, chaired by Heather White, that arranged the annual Oscar Wilde Weekend in Enniskillen, held each year in June. A report of the 2003 event was published in our July issue that year, but the website and e-mail addresses no longer function and although a festival was held in 2004 we have not been able to find recent news. We hope this situation will change, and will report any news that we are sent.

b. The Oscar Wilde Society of Japan

We have an e-mail address for this Society, but no reply has been made to our enquiry and we have been unable to learn anything about it from other sources.

c. The Oscar Wilde Literary Trust

This was a breakaway group from The Oscar Wilde Society to which one occasionally finds references. Its web page, http://website.lineone.net/~oscar_wilde/, still works, but is blank after the title. The group, which was never in any legal sense a trust, no longer exists.

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