An Electronic Journal for the Exchange of Information

on Current Research, Publications and Productions

concerning

Oscar Wilde and His Worlds

Vol. IV No. 2

February 2007 : Issue number 33

oscholars@gmail.com

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We do not publish e-mail addresses in full but the sign @ will bring up an e-mail form.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	continued from col. 1
II. News from The Editor	4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph
III. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS	5. Wilde on the Curriculum
IV. NEWS FROM READERS	6. Drinking with Oscar
1. Ellmann and after: A proposal	7. Albert Besnard’s portrait of Oscar Wilde
2. George Moore in Lille	8. Whistler
3. William Morris	9. A Wilde Collection
4. Literary London	10. The Canterville Ghost
V. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC: Reviews	10. The Soul of Man
VI. PUBLICATIONS & PAPERS	11. The Other Oscar
VII. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE	12. Oscar in Popular Culture
1. Reading and Literary Discussion Groups	X. ‘Mad, Scarlet Music’
2. Exhibitions	XI. GOING WILDE: Productions.
3. Society News	XII. SHAVINGS
4. Conferences, Seminars, Lectures	XIII. WEB FOOT NOTES
5. Dublin Gay Theatre Festival	XIV. SOME SELL AND OTHERS BUY
6. A Museum and Two Libraries, London	XV. THE WILDE CALENDAR & CHRONOLOGY
7. Work in Progress	XVI. BIBLIOGRAPHY Gabriel P. Weisberg
8. Awards	XVII. AND I? MAY I SAY NOTHING?
VIII. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS	XVIII. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY: THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS
IX. NOTES AND QUERIES	1. The Oscar Wilde Society
1. Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley	2. The Société Oscar Wilde
2. Victor Plarr	3. The Oscar Wilde Society of America
3. Editors sought	4. Project Oscar Wilde
To top of column 2

I. THE EDITORIAL TEAM

Editor: D.C. Rose M.A. (Oxon), Dip. Arts Admin. (NUI) late of the Department of English Goldsmiths College University of London @
Associate Editor for Australasia Angela Kingston formerly of the Department of English Adelaide University @	Redactrice pour la France (Affaires culturelles) / Associate Editor for France (Cultural Affairs) Danielle Guérin @
Redakteurin fur Österreich und deutsche Schweiz / Associate Editor for Austria and German Switzerland: Sandra Mayer Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Wien, Österreich @	Redacteur voor België en Nederland/ Associate Editor for Belgium and The Netherlands: Eva Thienpont Vakgroep Engelse Literatuur Universiteit Gent België/Belgique/Belgien @
Redakteurin fur Deutschland / Associate Editor for Germany: Lucia Krämer Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Regensburg, Deutschland @	Associate Editor for Ireland: Maureen O’Connor Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow, Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway @
Associate Editor for China, Taiwan and Singapore: Linda Piu-Ling Wong Department of English Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong Hong Kong @	Associate Editor for India: Gulshan Taneja Department of English Ram Lal Anand College University of Delhi @
Associate Editors for Italy: Elisa Bizzotto Università di Trento @ Rita Severi Università di Verona @
Associate Editor (Music): Tine Englebert Rijksuniversiteit Gent België/Belgique/Belgien @
Associate Editors (Theatre): Michelle Paull (England) Tiffany Perala (USA) St Mary’s University College Marylhurst University Twickenham, Middlesex Portland, Oregon @ @
Associate Editor (Conferences) Dr Florina Tufescu late of the Department of English University of Exeter @
Associate Editor: The Sibyl * Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux Université de la Réunion @ Associate Editor: Moorings ** Mark Llewellyn University of Liverpool @

* New quarterly supplement in advanced preparation on Vernon Lee.

** New quarterly supplement in advanced preparation on George Moore.

Publication is scheduled to coincide with George Moore Conference at the University of Lille.

II. News from the Editor

February has come and gone, and we are running after it. This is the first issue of THE OSCHOLARS to be published 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 when complete will house all our publications as a fully navigable, searchable and sophisticated website. 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.

Last month we announced that we would be expanding our coverage the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle and began by publishing a bibliography of Professor Gabriel P. Weisberg (University of Minnesota), with the generous assistance of Professor Weisberg himself. In pursuit of this aim, we will also be expanding our Whistler supplement Nocturne and are very pleased to announce that Elaine Saniter will be joining our team as an Associate Editor with that responsibility. Ms Saniter comes from that great repository of Whistler material and knowledge, the University of Glasgow and its Department of the History of Art. Similarly Shavings will have as Associate Editor in future Barbara Pfeifer of the University of Vienna. We are delighted to strengthen our team with the addition of these young scholars.

The preparation of a quarterly supplement devoted to Vernon Lee (The Sibyl), under the editorship of Sophie Geoffroy-Menoux (Université de la Réunion) is now nearly complete; while Shavings is about to be joined by Moorings, a supplement devoted to George Moore and his circle, edited by Mark Llewellyn of the University of Liverpool. This will mark the George Moore Conference at the University of Lille at the end of March. All this, together with the continued flourishing of our French language sister publication Rue des beaux-arts, edited by our Associate Editor for French Cultural Affairs Danielle Guérin, constitutes a formidable engagement with the fin-de-siècle.

The first two of our planned special, once-off, supplements, are in train. One of these will be to mark next October the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde; the guest editor for this will be Dr Michèle Mendelssohn of the University of Edinburgh. @

The other supplement is on Teleny. We believe it is high time that scholarship on Teleny is brought together and the arguments about it properly marshalled. This will be 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. @

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 are delighted to say that Colleen Platt has accepted the position as moderator. A committed Wildëan and experienced moderator, she will keep a firm hand on the controls. She will be assisted 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 will also be a very convenient way of making announcements that fall between issues of THE OSCHOLARS, or to herald the arrival of the new issues. As only subscribers to THE OSCHOLARS 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. 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 . We will announce the transfer of pages to our new website by this means.

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.

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-de-siècle, we reveal Wilde’s essential stage setting and, we hope, augment his place within it.

THE OSCHOLARS has hitherto been composed in Bookman Old Style, chiefly 10 point. If you do not have this font, you will view the journal in your standard default font. It has been suggested that Bookman O.S. is not a good font for internet use and that 10 point is too small. As an experiment we shifted to a standard of 11 point, but this was not thought superior. On this, as on all other matters, we seek the opinion of our readers. If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you can adjust use the text size command in the View menu. The same is true for Firefox and it may be the same for Netscape.

• In July 2003, to celebrate our entry into our third year, we decided to offer readers who have published articles on Wilde in anthologies or journals that are not readily accessible the opportunity to republish them (amended if desired) on THE OSCHOLARS website. This offer is also extended to abstracts or précis of unpublished doctoral theses. In either case, these must come as e-mail attachments formatted in Word or on diskette. In the former case, the name of the anthology or journal, its volume and number, editor, 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 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.
• Such articles 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. Transfer of these articles is not yet complete.

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THE OSCHOLARS APPENDIX.

It is now possible to view on their own pages a number of Tables and material gathered from different issues of THE OSCHOLARS in an Appendix. 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 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 melmoth@aliceadsl.fr. Underlined text in blue can be clicked for navigation through the document or to other addresses.

We are pleased to record that since our relaunch in October 2006 we have gained 56 new readers and recovered some whose addresses had been lost.

III. GUIDANCE FOR SUBMISSIONS & CORRESPONDENCE

Rather than repeat this each month, as was our former practice, we have posted the Guidance for Submissions and Correspondence on it own page where it can be consulted by clicking here.

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

1. Ellmann and After: A proposal

We wrote in our leading article of our plans to issue a special supplement to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde. This will have the general theme of ‘Richard Ellmann: Revalued / Re-evaluated’. Trevor Fisher writes

5th October 2007 will see the 20th anniversary of the publication of Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde. This has become the definitive statement for the current era. Although the book has drawn criticism, its magisterial quality and voluminous research have given it the pre-eminent role in Wilde studies since its appearance. Few biographies in the late twentieth century received so overwhelmingly favourable a reception. The views of Claire Tomalin that this was ‘a near perfect biography’ and Anthony Burgess summing this up as ‘A Great Book’ were typical. The book established a reputation which has grown over the last two decades.

The book summed up a paradigm which had been emerging since the early 1960s, the view of Wilde as victim, and established this theme as the framework within which Wilde studies has developed thereafter. Criticism and alternative versions of Wilde’s career have made little impression on the dominance of Ellmann’s interpretations of Wilde’s life and downfall. It became a major influence on popular views on Wilde through the film Wilde (1997) which was scripted by Julian Mitchell from Ellmann’s book.

Ellmann’s book has thus had a major academic and popular impact which is continuing. The predominant effect of the book has been to reinforce the view of Wilde as an iconic figure who was both a literary genius and a social victim – or as Wilde himself said of his future, ‘I shall now live as the Infamous St Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr’ (1) Ellmann’s achievement was to encapsulate this image of Wilde for a generation (2)

The magisterial quality of the book ensured it would supplant more sceptical and critical views, and it has come to overshadow Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 work and the Richard Pine biographical sketch of 1983.

However two decades on, the qualities which made Ellmann’s book the definitive biography for its time demand reconsideration. Horst Schroeder has alleged there are a large number of factual errors (3), but these are less important than the perspective from which Ellmann approached his subject. He adopted a view of Wilde which ran the risk of special pleading. John Bayley reviewed the book approvingly, commenting that Ellmann ‘adores Wilde and such a love is the foundation of the best biography’. But if love is blind, is adoration not close to hagiography?

Despite the immense authority of the Ellmann biography, it’s impact needs critical consideration and the twentieth anniversary of its publication seems appropriate for such consideration. Apart from the book’s intrinsic interest for Wildeans, its reception and subsequent history raise wider cultural issues about the role of biography in a celebrity obsessed age. Ellmann was pre-eminently a scholar and his work evidence based. It remains the essential starting point for serious study of Wilde.

However the use of the book seems increasingly to be as a function of a celebrity obsessed and gossip relating age to produce images which are increasingly unrealistic. What price biography in the Age of Reality TV? (4) Both the work itself and its cultural role need scrutiny. Ellmann essayed a sympathetic reading of his subject, but this has taken on a life of its own.

I am suggesting a day school be organised in October 2007 to consider such a scrutiny. Clearly this will need a body of opinion in support, from the widest possible spectrum of expertise, and considerable planning.

This note is to test whether there is sufficient support for such a project to be undertaken. I would like to gauge whether enough support exists, and would ask anyone interested in supporting such a project in principle to contact me, without commitment, to discuss how the project might be carried forward.

My email is trevor.fisher2@ntlworld.com and I will respond to any reasonable suggestions in response to this proposal.

(Trevor Fisher is the author of Oscar And Bosie; A Fatal Passion, Sutton 2002. His recently published pamphlet on the Wilde Phenomenon, Oscar Wilde; The Legacy: Essays on critical issues of Wilde Studies: can be obtained from Outlook Services, PO Box 2028, Stafford ST16 3WA, price £3. Cheques should be made out to Trevor Fisher.)

(1) Complete Letters 2000 p.1041, letter of 18th March 1898

(2) The key phrase was used, without quotes, on the front cover of the Times Literary Supplement of 9th February 2001, as the main headline.

(3) Horst Schroeder Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, Braunschweig 2002.

(4) The actor Rupert Everett was quoted in the Wilde Society newsletter Intentions (December 2006) as wanting to make a film of the last years of Wilde because ‘He was the last of the great vagabonds – this syphilitic hobbling man who sat drunk in the corners of nightclubs – I can identify with that’ (p.15) This caricature of Wilde’s last years owes something to Ellmann, particularly the syphilis.

2. George Moore in Lille

Ann Heilmann (University of Hull) is one of the Committee (Fabienne Dabrigeon-Garcier (Université Lille 3), Bernard Escarbelt (Université Lille 3), Christine Huguet (Université Lille 3), Alain Labau (Université de Caen), Mary Pierse (University College Cork)) arranging a George Moore Conference at the Université de Lille Friday 30th and Saturday 31st titled « George Moore: le passage des frontières  ».

The organisers are Fabienne Garcier et Christine Huguet. Contact : Brigitte Vanyper. Tél/ fax : 03.20.41.60.93.

3. William Morris

Eugene D. LeMire’s A Bibliography of William Morris has been published by the British Library. 386pp. ISBN 978 0 7123 4926 0. £80.

4. Literary London

Lawrence Phillips (University of Northampton) draws our attention to the 2007 Literary London Conference, the 6th in the series, which will be hosted by the Department of English, University of Westminster, London, at their 309 Regent Street building.  (http://www.wmin.ac.uk/page-42). Dr Phillips is the founder and director of this conference. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 31st March. The Call for Papers can be found in our section Being Talked About. Click

V. THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

Last month’s review section contained reviews of two productions of The Importance of being Ernest (Joseph Donohue, Lesley Jenike) and the Dutch prizewinning novel about gay life in 1890s London, (Petra Kerkhove). This month Maureen O’Connor reviews The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross, Marco Pustianaz reviews The Dedalus Book of Decadence, Frederick Roden reviews Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction, R.K.R. Thornton reviews Bound for the 1890s: Essays on Writing and Publishing in Honor of James G. Nelson and Katherine Maynard reviews a recent production of Gross Indecency: the Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. The Critic as Critic may be found be clicking .

We welcome offers to review from readers.

Clicking will take you to the Table of Contents of all our reviews.

VI. 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

VII. NEWS FROM ELSEWHERE

1. Reading and Discussion Groups

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.’

This active group is currently discussing The Ambassadors by Henry James, to be followed by Armadale by Wilkie Collins.

The group has 341 members. 341 messages were posted in January.

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, and although it still has 20 members may be regarded as having ceased to operate. We will advise readers if it is revived. It can be found at http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/EpoqueVictorienneAnglaiseEnLisant/.

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, to be followed in April by Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century.

It can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FrenchLiterature/ and has 183 members.

Visions

This group is currently reading and discussing books about Vlad Tepes [also known as Vlad the Impaler - Dracula]. Dracula is a subject that we have not hitherto considered for THE OSCHOLARS, as the Wilde connection is rather tenuous (Florence Balcombe / Bram Stoker); but Stoker’s book must be considered part of the decadent literature of the fin-de-siècle.

The schedule is as follows:

Core book: In Search of Dracula by Radu Floresca. 1st to 23rd March/

Fiction: CHOICE OF The Castle in Transylvania by Jules Verne OR Vlad: A Novel by Melodie Romeo. 24th March to 15th April.

Social History: CHOICE OF: Vlad Dracula, the Life and Times of the Historical Dracula by Kurt Treptow OR Transylvania: A Short History by Istvan Lazar. 16th April to 10th May.

Journal: The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing by Allen Kupfer. 11th to 31st May.

Also:
Vlad Dracula the Dragon Prince by Michael Augustyn; Dracula: Prince of Many Faces by Radu Florescu; and of course Dracula by Bram Stoker.

The group is to be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VisionsPP/ and has forty 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 of the five postings three are conference announcements and two concern a television adaptation of Jane Eyre, which hardly qualifies as 1880-1920. ELCS is perhaps overshadowed by the VICTORIA group.

@

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 out 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 February poem is ‘ Old Furniture’; that for March ‘Jezreel’.

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.

@

2. Exhibitions

As stated in our opening remarks, we believe the visual arts of the fin-de-siècle have been under-represented in THE OSCHOLARS. We intend to rectify this by noticing exhibitions and publications and reviewing them when possible in tandem with those on the writers of the period. This section has its own page, reached by clicking

Exhibitions noticed this month are:

TABLE OF CONTENTS [There may be more than one entry per exhibition]
Bastien-Lapage	Sickert
Couperus	Von Stück
Denis	Tiffany
Drouet, Juliette	Van Gogh (1)
Filiger	Van Gogh (2)
Klinger	Van Gogh (3)
Macdonald & McNair	Vollard
Monet	Impressionists (1)
Moser	Impressionists (2)
Pissarro, Camille	Belle époque
Pissarro, Lucien	The Nabis
Redon	Symbolism
Rodin (1)	Pre-Raphaelites
Rodin (2)	Times of Harmony: The Artist’s Paradise in the 19th Century
Rops	La Plume
continued in col.2

3. News of Societies

We do not wish this list to be anglocentric and welcome information about similar organisations in all countries, although French societies are 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.

Societies listed are

Table of Contents
Hero Societies
1. The Louis Couperus Society	9. The George MacDonald Society
2. The Stephen Crane Society	10. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society
3. The Ford Madox Ford Society	11. The Octave Mirbeau Society
4. The A.E. Housman Society	12.  The William Morris Society
5. The Ibsen Society of America	13.  The William Morris Society of Canada
6.  The Irving Society	14.  The William Morris Society of the U.S.A.
7. The Henry James Society	15. The Robert Louis Stevenson Club
8. The Arthur Machen Society	16. The Edith Wharton Society
17. The Association of Literary Societies
Go to top of column 2
Subject Societies
1.  The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings	8.  The Furniture History Society
2. The Irish Association of Art Historians	9. The Association of Historians of Nineteenth Century Art
3. The Scottish Society for Art History	10. The Irish Society for Theatre Research
4.  The Arts & Crafts Society of New York	11. The Pre-Raphaelite Society
5. The Bedford Park Society	12. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education
6.  The Decorative Arts Society	13. The Society for Theatre Research
7. The Eighteen-Nineties Society	14. The Victorian Society
continued top of column 2/…	15.  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 melmoth@aliceadsl.fr.

4. 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 in this issue:

Table of Contents

1.  Fin de Siècle Studies at Oxford

2. 19th Century Group at UCLA

3. Sculpture and the Museum

4. Victorian Literature & Culture

5. Victorian Periodicals

6. Matisse

7. Victorian Pantomime

8. Tradition and Innovation

9. Birth of the Bestseller

10. George Moore

11. Victorian Cosmopolitanism

12. Museums and the Web

13. Theatre Research

14. Theatre, Fin-de-siècle and the Boundaries of Modernism

15. Seminar series on Oscar Wilde

16. Irish Studies in Hungary

17. 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.

<< After we have discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans,

we will pass on to the question of the critic considered in the light of the interpreter >>

5. 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.

6. The Theatre Museum, London; the British Library; the Wellcome Library

As previously reported, The Theatre Museum in London’s Covent Garden went dark in the New Year. This is part of the policy by the owner, the Victoria and Albert Museum, to improve its service to the public, or, as they put it themselves ‘Although the Theatre Museum's site in Covent Garden will be closed from January 2007 there is no intention to change the status, role or strategy of the Theatre Museum as the UK's national collection for the performing arts.’

Not surprisingly a Theatre Museum defence association has been founded, the Theatre Museum Guardians’ campaign. More information from Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.com or office@theatremuseumguardians.org.uk; and at www.theatremuseumguardiansd.org.uk.

Another scholarly resource is also being menaced. As London prepares to sink hundreds millions of pounds into hosting the Olympic Games, it appears that the cultural institutions will have their grants raided (it would only need £600,000 to save the Theatre Museum). According to one report the British Library will start charging researchers, reduce opening hours, will pulp 15 per cent of its collection, and close the newspaper collection at Colindale. Help is requested: the BL management have said that the more letters of protest (to them, or to the newspapers) the better. The Library is ultimately at the mercy of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, an ill-assorted set of triplets, and will itself contest any cuts. Please e-mail chief-executive@bl.uk or supporters_forum@bl.uk with your name, contact number and message, or write to Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2D8. There is also http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/library/ to be used.

More can be found at www.bl.uk/spendingreview.html, a forum set up for supporters and to keep everyone  informed and engaged with developments.

Better news comes from the Wellcome Library which will shortly be moving back to its historic home at 183 Euston Road and re-opening there on Monday 16th April. Full details can be found on the website at
http://library.wellcome.ac.uk.

7. 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. Dr Molly Youngkin (California State University Dominguez Hills) has allowed us to reproduce (very slightly edited) a message she posted with the VICTORIA group.

A couple of years ago, I was working on an annotated edition of Sarah Grand's Ideala (1888).  I submitted a proposal to several presses, including Broadview, that was praised by the editors but ultimately was turned down, on the basis that there was not a sufficient enough undergraduate market for the book.  Recently, Broadview agreed to revisit my proposal, but I need to provide evidence that the book would be taught in
undergraduate courses.

One advantage it has over Grand's other novels (and Victorian novels by other authors) is that it's significantly shorter:  only 190 pages long.  If you think you would teach it in a course and wouldn't mind being named as a supportive colleague in the proposal, please send me a brief note, indicating why you likely would teach it and in which course(s). 
@

Anne Anderson is trying to track down the chinamania skit penned by Hugh Conway c. 1875 mentioned by Elizabeth Aslin in her seminal book on the Aesthetic movement. She may have the date wrong... it could be 1882-4. Original source is Mrs Comyns Carr.  Any ideas? She has been through the Lord Chancellor's collection.

This and any other chinamania goodies gratefully received for her book Old Blue China from Whistler to Wilde.

@

8. 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.

VIII. BEING TALKED ABOUT: CALLS FOR PAPERS

This section also 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 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.

Other calls listed this month are:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Victorian Emotions	7. Symbiosis
2. Time and the Victorian Press	8. Ruskinian Theatre
3. Victorian Materialities	9. Victorian Art Criticism
4. Sex	10. George Gissing
5. Literary Tourism & 19thc Culture	11. Victorian Women & The Occult
6. Literary London	12. Ford Madox Ford
Go to column 2

IX. NOTES AND QUERIES

« Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are. »

1. Oscar Wilde and Aleister Crowley

Geoff Dibb writes

Aleister Crowley does not (mercifully) appear in the Wilde story’ we were told in October’s Oscholars [This was October 2003 – Ed.) It was the ‘mercifully’ which caught my eye – but I could remember something about him and Wilde and the memorial at Père Lachaise. However, before I wrote this note I did a quick look up of Crowley’s life and there are a few areas where he did get close to Wilde, although it does look as though they never met. Briefly these ‘appearances’ are:

v In 1898, at age 23, Crowley joined The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Members included William Butler Yeats, Maud Gonne, Constance Wilde, Arthur Machen, Arthur Edward Waite, Florence Farr, Algernon Blackwood and possibly, Sax Rohmer and Bram Stoker.

v The young Crowley wrote poetry and fiction and his publisher for several of his works was Leonard Smithers.

v Althea Gyles, the 1890s poet and artist, not only had an affair with Smithers, but also left Crowley for Smithers. The affair seems to have begun around the autumn of 1899 as Althea was engaged on designs for the pirated edition of The Harlot’s House for Smithers. (She also produced the cover designs for Yeats’s The Secret Rose (1897), Poems (1899), The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) and Dowson’s Decorations in Verse and Prose (1899)). After Wilde’s death Althea wrote offering Smithers six pounds in order to attend the funeral in Paris.

v Richard Ellmann visited Crowley at Hastings shortly before his death in 1947. He told Professor Ellmann the story of his involvement with Althea Gyles and Ellmann published an article, ‘Black Magic Against White: Aleister Crowley Versus W. B. Yeats’, in the Partisan Review in 1948.

Finally, the story I remembered is recounted in An Angel for a Martyr (Michael Pennington, Whiteknights Press 1987), which tells the story behind Jacob Epstein’s monument for Wilde at Pere Lachaise cemetery. Apparently, the Parisian authorities considered the male genitalia on Epstein’s sculpture indecent and ordered the statue to be covered by tarpaulin. Epstein would not make any changes and Ross grew increasingly fed up with the whole affair, eventually having a bronze butterfly-shaped covering made and attached to the statue. He then asked Crowley to take the lead in the unveiling in 1914, which he did. Epstein would have nothing to do with it. However, a few weeks’ later, Crowley removed the bronze covering and handed it over to Epstein in the Café Royale after appearing before him in full evening dress with the butterfly plaque hanging round his neck ‘as a cod-piece’.

2. Victor Plarr

Victor Plarr was born near Strasbourg in 1863, but grew up in England, the country of his mother, and read History at Worcester College, Oxford.  A member of the Rhymers Club, he is remembered for In the Dorian Mode (1896) and his book on Ernest Dowson,  Ernest Dowson, 1888-1897 : reminiscences, unpublished letters, and marginalia (1914).

Calling a book in The Dorian Mode while Wilde was in prison may be seen as a gesture of solidarity.  Plarr died in 1929, leaving a daughter Marion.  Marion Plarr is the subject of research of  Dr Val Morgan at the University of Essex, and if anyone has information please send it to g.morgan3@ntlworld.com or morgvd@essex.ac.uk

3. Editors Sought

We reproduce, slightly edited, the following from VICTORIA.

Valancourt Books, an independent press based in Chicago, is seeking editors for books by the following writers from the Victorian period:

v Robert Smith Surtees, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Lever, Richard Marsh, G. A. Henty, Guy Boothby, Tasma, Bram Stoker, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

If anyone on this list has worked with these authors, or would be interested in so doing, please contact m.  We also welcome proposals for other authors/titles that might fit in well with our developing catalog. 

Please feel free to contact me or visit our site at http://www.valancourtbooks.com for more information.

James D. Jenkins, Publisher/General Editor, Valancourt Books.

jjenkins@valancourtbooks.com

4. Oscar Wilde and the Kinematograph

News

We have picked up no new information about either the Rupert Everett of Al Pacino films (see our January edition), but add in here the web address of an account of Mr Pacino’s involvement with Salome, kindly sent us by Lou Ferreira.

http://www.salomeinla.com/media/

Al Pacino

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.

5. 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 supplements (Whistler, Shaw, George Moore and Vernon Lee is also welcome).

6. Oscar Wilde, shaken and perhaps stirred.

In January we drew readers’ attention to the fortuitously named champagne Pol Carson, brut. This followed a short piece in our autumn issues on the Bordeaux wine Mille Secousses, which Robert Sherard reported as a favourite with Wilde and Whistler while they were still on drinking terms. Here we reproduce the recipe for the cocktail Wilde Mule, which we gave in a very early issue of THE OSCHOLARS.

1 shot Sebor absinthe

freshly squeezed lime juice

top up with ginger ale.

7. A Portrait of Oscar Wilde

The French art historian Chantal Beauvalot is working on the painter Albert Besnard, who painted one of the few portraits of Wilde. This was sold at auction in France, its present whereabouts is unknown and Mme Beauvalot has only a very poor quality reproduction. She is anxious to know the circumstances in which Besnard painted the portrait, its date and its current owner. We would be extremely interested to hear from any reader who may have any information, which we will of course pass to Dr Beauvalot.

8. 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. As noted above, we are very pleased that Elaine Saniter from the University of Glasgow will be assisting us with this from now on.

Notice of three exhibitions and an article has been posted this month.

To see Nocturne, click

9. A Wilde Collection

In our January edition we published a description of the Wilde Collection (Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection) now in the University of Leeds. 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.

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.

10. A Source for the Canterville Ghost?

1891. ‘I lunched at Wadham [College, Oxford], with a family named Worthington, father, mother, son and daughters. They had all lived for fifteen years in a vicarage where a ghost made frequent and apparently quite meaningless appearances. Commonly identified with Abraham Cowley, it paid no attention to citations from that poet’s works; frightened nobody except newly arrived maidservants, and had once been unwise enough to venture out on to the lawn, whence the irreverent youngsters chased it with tennis-rackets through the net.’

–C.J. Holmes: Self & Partners (mostly Self). London: Constable 1936 p.124n.

11. …and an appearance for The Soul of Man under Socialism.

Ken Knabb writes

In case it is of any interest to you, an excerpt from The Soul of Man Under
Socialism is cited as the epigram to the last chapter of my The Joy of
Revolution. You can find it at http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/joyrev4.htm

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS

P.O. Box 1044, Berkeley CA 94701

http://www.bopsecrets.org

12. The Other Oscar

We continue to compile information for a biography of that other Oscar Wilde in his parallel world. Here is a quotation from one of the inner reaches of the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Wilde was a famous dandy and wit. He is best known for plays such as Lady Windermere's Fan, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was later turned into a novel.

That’s what happens when you close a theatre museum…

13. Oscar in Popular Culture

The best-known lines of Oscar Wilde have entered the anima mundi, quoted and more than often misquoted without acknowledgement. Here is one from Raymond Chandler: ‘Sometimes a man kills the dearest thing he loves, they say’. (Playback. London Hamish Hamilton 1958, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books1957 1961 p.57.) We can add the following exchange from Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing. London: Hamish Hamilton 1951; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1957 p.8.

‘The Englishmen who love France are always the worst.’

‘The worst?’

‘Each man kills the things he loves, you know.’

It is hard to find common ground between Chandler and Mitford, but the structural affinity between the two quotations is striking. Nor are they the only nod towards Wilde in either book – there is also a house called Bunbury Court in The Blessing and a man called Umney in Playback.

X. '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 .

XI. GOING WILDE

This section also has its own page specially 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 are usually be provided.

We thank those readers who have drawn our attention to many of these productions, and especially our two Associate Editors for Theatre, Tiffany Perala and Michelle Paull.

XII. SHAVINGS

Our supplement Shavings (news of productions and publications on George Bernard Shaw, and of the Shaw Societies) is being moved into its own subsite as part of www.oscholars.com. As noted above, we will in future have the assistance with Shavings of 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 22 by clicking the picture of a cornet:

XIII. WEB FOOT NOTES

Our monthly look at websites of possible interest. Contributions welcome here as elsewhere.

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 Februarys 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

The website www.oscariana.net is for sale. To buy it, contact Domain Marketplace, http://www.domainmarketplace.com/oscariana.net. http://www.ephemeraldelights.com/ is part of ‘Miss Mary’s’ Victoriana family of sites, which we report on elsewhere in Trafficking for Strange Webs.

http://www.poesiedumonde.com is a site of great beauty, created by one of our readers, Maria Merrett. Outside the concerns of THE OSCHOLARS we are still happy to mention it.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/ is a gateway to (as it claims) 4,154 journals containing 27,545,408 articles (articles updated this week 92,930). These are very largely to do with trade, law and current affairs, but further investigation using the site’s search engine might be useful.

XIV. 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.

.

XV. 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.

XVI. BIBLIOGRAPHy

In this section we have been publishing brief bibliographies of works chiefly concerning Wilde but also with wider aspects of the fin-de-siècle. These are in a simple form as references, rather than detailed lists in a bibliophile sense. Contributions welcome. A new bibliography is published here each month with a guide to the bibliographies previously given each month. These are also subsequently posted on their own pages, reached by clicking

This enables us to add new items to the lists.

A substantial Oscar Wilde bibliography is to be found on the Princess Grace of Monaco Irish Library site, but it is necessary to be a registered subscriber to have access. The site itself can be reached by clicking its banner:

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 thank 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 has, since 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.

This month we publish a first list of articles on The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Alkalay-Gut, Karen	The Thing He Loves: Murder as æsthetic Experience in ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’	Victorian Poetry 35 pp.349-66 *		1997
Arms, G. & Whitesell, J. E.	Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol	The Explicator		1943 March
Baker Jr, Houston A.	The Ballad of Reading Gaol: An Enduring Monument	Reading & Collecting		1937 27th May
Borges, Jorge Luis	La balada de la càrcel de Reading El tamaño de mi esperanza	Proa		1926
Botero, E.	Versiones colombianas de la ‘Balada de la càrcel de Reading’	Universidad Pontificiana Bolivariana		1964
Boxmann-Winkler, K. C.	The Ballad of Reading Gaol & De Profundis	De Gids 3		1916
Buckler, William E.	Oscar Wilde’s ‘chant de cygne’: The Ballad of Reading Gaol in Contextual Perspective	Victorian Poetry 28 : 3/4		1990 Autumn / Winter
Fane, Violet (Lady Currie)	The Ballad of Reading Gaol	The Nineteenth Century		1904 July
Gallup-Diaz, Anjali	The Author, His Friends, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol	Epistolary Acts; Reading Wilde / Querying Spaces	Fales Library	1995
Heaney, Seamus	Speranza in Reading - On the Ballad of Reading Gaol	The Redress of Poetry	Faber & Faber	1995
Miller, Robert Keith	The Man of Sorrows: De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol	Chapter VI of ‘Oscar Wilde’	Frederick Ungar	1982
Nassaar, Christopher	Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’	The Explicator 53 : 3 pp.158-60		1995 Spring
Nathan, Leonard	The Ballad of Reading Gaol: At the Limits of the Lyric	Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde	G.K. Hall	1991
Page, Norman	Decoding The Ballad of Reading Gaol	Rediscovering Oscar Wilde	Colin Smythe Princess Grace Library vol 8	1994
Pollin, Burton R.	The Influence of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ upon ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’	Revue des langues vivantes 3 pp.228-34		1974
Scott, Robin and ‘Bunbury’	Oscar Wilde and the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Mark Burgess at the Wilde Theatre, Bracknell	The Wildean 6		1995 January
Stamm, Rudolf	W.B. Yeats und Oscar Wildes ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’	Wiener Beitr. zur englische Philologie 65	Braumüller	1957

• Also at http://vp.engl.wvu.edu/fall97/gut.htm

XVII. 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 will also contain occasional vanity publishing by the Editor.

In 'And I? May I Say Nothing?' last month we published an article by Andreas Pichler on the use of fog as a conceit in The Picture of Dorian Gray. We also published an abstract of the paper ‘Pygmalion Swoons: The Aesthetics of Subjection in Morris, Pater, and Wilde’ by Mia McIver (Department of English, University of California, Irvine) given at the William Morris Society’s session, Modern Language Association Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27th - 30th December 2006; and an abstract of the doctoral thesis by Costanza Vettori (Università di Trento) on De Profundis.

This month we are pleased to publish ‘Des Profondeurs’, an original work by Danielle Guérin, who is not only one of our Associate Editors on THE OSCHOLARS but also editor of Rue des beaux arts, the journal of the Société Oscar Wilde in France, of which she is one of the four founder members.

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 and to Impressions, the journals of the Oscar Wilde Society and the Oscar Wilde Society of America (see next item).

XVIII. NEVER SPEAKING DISRESPECTFULLY

THE OSCAR WILDE SOCIETIES & ASSOCIATIONS

v We welcome news from any Oscar Wilde group.

1. 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 the Cadogan Hotel, 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.

The latest issue of The Wildean was published in January 2007.

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 most recent was no. 47, published in December 2006, and running to twenty-six pages.

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 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 will now resume this practice.

The Wildean No. 30 was issued in January 2007 with the following contents:

Michael Seeney	Oscar Wilde in Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Anne Anderson	Let’s Live Up to It! Or Wilde About Teapots
Joseph Donohue	E.W. Godwin’s Failed Production of The Duchess of Padua
Horst Schroeder	‘Suicide of Vivian Wilde’
Arnold T. Schwab	Wilde and Swinburne, Part II
Ralph Stewart	Through the Looking Glass [The Importance of being Ernest]
Nick Frigo	Posters & Posing, Oscar Wilde in America in 1882
Nicola Batty	Wilde in Fiction

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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.

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Your details: (please use BLOCK CAPITALS)

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

Date …………………..............

TO 02/07

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: vanessasalome@blueyonder.co.uk

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: donmead@wildean.demon.co.uk

2. 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 danielle.guerin@radiofrance.com. Its archives are housed with those of THE OSCHOLARS at www.irishdiaspora.net, but will be 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.

The February issue 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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