Contested green spaces on the early modern stage, 1590-1634

Oscar Wilde's plays on upper-class Victorian society are set apart from contemporary drama both by their wit and their reappraisal of conventions, particularly in dealing with transgressive women. The fallen woman's prominence in popular culture and the stage during a period of intense suffragism attests to woman's role as a touchstone of moral stability, contemporary plays viewing deviant women as threats to a man's world. Wilde mocks society's confinement of women, fallen or not, into prescribed roles and undercuts customary morality but fears self-determining women's disruptive power. A tool of perceiving this ambivalence is the self-fashioning dandy, who repudiates social constraints and yet foils transgressive women's attempts at self-fashioning. The surface mockery of conventional fears of female aspirations as threats to masculine orderliness conceals a greater fear of female autonomy as a threat to masculinity itself. This study locates the dramatic and moral urgency of Wilde's five major plays, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest and Salome in this conflicting response to the feminine, which also determines his choice of theme and form both in his comedies of manners and symbolic drama.

Women as figures of disorder in the plays of Oscar Wilde

Occulture: W.B. Yeats' prose fiction and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival

Since this paper is to be discussed, it should be controversial. Since it is not to be delivered orally, it may include frequent and extensive quotation. The purpose of the quotations is to perplex and horrify the reader. I had, before beginning to compile these, only an uncomfortable suspicion that the label's were not being accurately used. I now have the factual evidence that their general misuse and misapprehension constitutes a scandal in literary history. Indeed the confusion embodied in this subject is such as to rock the reason. One might suppose that, although in the heat of battle decadents and aesthetes might not have sorted themselves out, by now the lines would be correctly drawn. Not so. It appears that as time goes on confusion is confounded. To be really in the dark you have only to sample the guide or reference books which you presumably do not but your students, to their undoing, may.

Truth in Labelling: Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, Fin de Siècle

Author(s): Morgan, Benjamin | Advisor(s): Cascardi, Anthony J; Spackman, Barbara | Abstract: The Matter of Beauty proposes that Victorian aesthetic theory is not a branch of philosophy focusing on art; rather, it is best understood as an interdisciplinary investigation of how humans relate affectively to physical things. The central claim of the dissertation is that aesthetic theory in the late-Victorian period enabled a significant reconsideration of what a "human" was, and of how distinctions could be drawn between self and other. I pursue this claim across four authors -- Walter Pater, William Morris, Grant Allen, and Vernon Lee -- who represent different modes in which a materialist strain of aesthetics led to a recognition that individuals constitutively lack autonomy from one another and from their surroundings.My analysis of a wide range of late-Victorian writing demonstrates that aesthetic theory responded to a question that was powerfully raised by nineteenth-century science, and that remains with us today: If our most elevated emotions can be localized as electrical activity in the brain, is there a "self" that transcends our material being? The intellectual tradition that I reconstruct reveals that considering aesthetic experience is a productive step toward answering this question. In their discussions of art and literature, Pater, Morris, Allen, and Lee develop a discourse of bodily sensations rather than of moral feelings; for them, aesthetic pleasure is important not because it is uplifting, but because it makes enjoyable the interconnectedness of bodies, minds, and matter. Furthermore, recovering this discourse allows us to revisit critical commonplaces about the political significance of Victorian aesthetics. Over the past two decades, the tendency has been to frame questions about the politics of aesthetics in oppositional terms: e.g., is aestheticism queer or misogynist, progressive or reactionary? I look elsewhere in order to evaluate the politics of aestheticism: representations of the individual as a material thing lacking autonomy reconfigured the relation between self and society. Materialist aesthetics showed individuals to be inherently dependent upon their contingent environments, thereby calling into question context-free ideals of personal freedom and individualism.

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The Matter of Beauty: Materialism and the Self in Victorian Aesthetic Theory

Dark passages : the decadent consciousness in Victorian literature

Walter Pater: L'Homme et L'Oeuvre

Pan the Goat God: His Myth in Modern Times

The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective

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Papers

Dark passages : the decadent consciousness in Victorian literature

Walter Pater: L'Homme et L'Oeuvre

Pan the Goat God: His Myth in Modern Times

The World of W. B. Yeats: Essays in Perspective

W B Yeats : Images of a Poet : My permanent or impermanent images