Showing papers in "English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 in 2017"

Principles, privilege and powerlessness in the Edwardian Prize Book: Bridging the gap between two opposing worlds

Abstract: In a world of mobile phones and tablets it is hard to imagine the joy that children once felt when presented with a book as a prize by the head teacher or the vicar of their church. By 1901, awarding books as prizes had become standard practice for most schools in Edwardian England. But how were these books viewed by recipients? Were their contents read over and over again or were they placed on the shelf as attractive editions? Were readers aware of their explicit pedagogy? This article unravels these and other questions by tracking the role of the prize book as an institutionalized object. Through an exploration of its content and prize inscription, we can gain a unique insight into Edwardian culture and society and examine the perpetual line that the prize book treads between privilege and powerlessness.

Galsworthy Among the Moderns: Reconsidering a Literary Quarrel

Abstract: Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and a succeeding generation of critics would repeatedly dismiss John Galsworthy as an "old fashioned" novelist incapable of embracing the aesthetic experimentation of modernist fiction. Woolf especially faulted her literary rivals with the claim, however inaccurate, that their fiction failed to capture the essential truths of individual life. While Woolf's dismissal of the Edwardians is well known, there has been scant scholarly attention to how Galsworthy responded to such attacks, how he positioned himself aesthetically and politically vis-a-vis an ascendant modernism. This article brings to light Galsworthy's unacknowledged participation in the changes into modernism. Galsworthy was just as much an interpreter of modernity as his Georgian successors. To reconsider Galsworthy's voice in those debates provides us with the opportunity to reassess the modernist struggle and his long-overlooked views on the role of the artist and on the nature, function, and scope of the novel.

Oscar Wilde, Dion Boucicault and the Pragmatics of Being Irish: Fashioning a New Brand of Modern Irish Celt

Abstract: This article makes the case that Wilde's engagement with his Irish national identity was sustained. Apparent inconsistencies have led some critics to challenge the appropriateness of identifying Wilde as an Irish writer. Wilde's strategies are similar to those of Dion Boucicault, the most successful Irish playwright of the 1860s and 1870s. The influence of Boucicault in helping Wilde to shape his professional career and develop his stagecraft illuminates not only Wilde's construction of a modern brand of Irish Celt, but also how both writers expressed such a conception on stage. Wilde and Boucicault were not purists in their conception and use of the term "Irish," nor indeed when it came to the role of professional playwright. They repudiated the stereotype of Ireland as a backward land; their alternative was not "ancient idealism" but a modern pragmatism that located them at the heart of an evolving international marketplace.

The Decadence of the West in Huysmans and Houellebecq: Decadence in the Longue Durée

Abstract: This article expands on Gagnier's seminal discussions in works such as Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 and "The Global Literatures of Decadence." Decadence has always functioned as a textual and social strategy, one historically and globally used to critique the relation of part to whole. It resurfaces as a marker of a social civic order in despair and disrepair. We may ask whether the decadence of current populism—its racism, violence, anti-intellectualism, and crude polarized oppositions—indicates a permanent decline or is rather the last gasp before some future graceful submission to higher social forms than are currently offered. In contrast to our current condition, Huysmans's description, as mediated by Houellebecq, has all the comfort and all the escapism of that now generalized and commodified fantasy of the Danish fantasy of home and coziness called hygge .

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the Erotics of Literary History: Straddling Epic

Abstract: Epic literature around 1900 was chiefly an archaic form. By 1922, however, the dominant idea of epic had become more about “making it new” than making it old. For Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot it was a polyphonic, fragmentary, encyclopedic genre and in contrast to its reactionary predecessor, an inclusive or cosmopolitan form. This article attempts not so much to smooth over this rift in epic but of problematizing it. Instead of offering a survey of the genre in this period, the focus here is on a single text as a node in which residual and emergent ideas of epic come together: T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph .

Sexual Identities and Patriotism in Wartime Britain: Literary No-Man's Land

Abstract: This article discusses the formation of literary queer identities in relation to national identities and patriotism. British genre texts deserve more critical attention, as their formulaic structure makes them excellent vehicles for the exploration of deviant and radical ideas. Two nonmodernist novels that highlight the interrelation of sexual and national identities (Despised and Rejected and The Well of Loneliness ) reveal how the Great War could serve as a literary setting for the discussion of what it meant to be British and homosexual/sexually inverted. Allatini's and Hall's literary responses to the challenges of national, gender and sexual identities could not be more different in tone, outlook and underlying ideology, not least because of their choice of sex for their protagonists. Yet both underscore the fact that the more fully a text embraces dissident political, sexual and gender identities, the more successful and convincing this presentation becomes. [145 words]

Gissing's New Grub Street and the Wider Concerns of Impoverishment

Abstract: Much attention has been paid to how New Grub Street represents the failures and successes of late-Victorian writers competing in the literary market of the 1880s. Such analyses clearly reveal Gissing's critique of the commercialization of literature and his sympathy for the precarious employment and poverty of authors whose opportunities to publish and earn a living depended on the mass appeal. But these interpretations do not take account of New Grub Street 's participation in much wider contemporary concerns about impoverishment, particularly those generated from a growing worry about rising unemployment. This article addresses that gap by considering how New Grub Street responds to the discourse of unemployment and under-employment that comprised two main versions of the causes of worklessness and poverty. New Grub Street exploits an ideological fault line to demonstrate that social inequities lay at the heart of unemployment to unsettle assumptions about their causes.

A Leap of Faith: Abbott, Bellamy, Morris, Wells and the Fin-de-Siècle Route to Utopia

Abstract: In the great surge of utopian writing that was produced during the fin de siecle , Edward Bellamy, William Morris and H. G. Wells among others imagined utopias that were global in scale and located in the future. They made a radical shift in utopian thinking by drawing a historical trajectory between their own time and that of utopia. A contemporaneous text that might seem to have little in common with these “historical utopias” is E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884). This article shows how closely its ideas can bring into focus those of the specifically utopian texts being written alongside it. Flatland breaks the conventions of utopian narrative by removing the reader from the narrative plane and situating us instead in the “impossible” third dimension. The “leap of faith” necessary for scientific or religious revelation is simultaneously invoked as the route to utopia.

Dowson's "Cynara" and the English Alexandrine: A Study of Form in Context

Abstract: “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” is Ernest Dowson’s most famous poem and one of the most celebrated lyrics of the legendary English 1890s. Why did it become so particularly famous? Supposing that its fame is no more than it deserves, the question might be approached from another direction: why is it so good? How persuasively can its strange success be explained? The inquiry is therefore a matter of literary history, insofar as it asks how the poem took shape, and how it found its place in the English lyrical tradition; but it is also a matter of literary criticism, in the most fundamental sense, insofar as it wants to discover and articulate, as precisely as possible, how the poem actually works to produce its very unusual and memorable effects.

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End

Abstract: art, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete artistic environment. But Morris loathed Wagner’s operas, felt that they trivialized the great legends on which they were based—he hated opera in general—while Fortuny was a great admirer. Both men believed in the close connection between labor and art, that pleasure in labor was essential to produce significant art. The so-called “lesser arts” were as important as paintings and sculptures in terms of their artistic accomplishments and centrality to life. In her discussion of these two splendid figures we are forcefully reminded of the richness of their achievements. This is a highly personal disquisition, almost meditation, on two designers and artists of genius (although Morris hated that term). One is grateful for A. S. Byatt’s intelligent pairing of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny.

Bart Kennedy: Hater of Slavery, Tramp and Professor of Walking

Abstract: Bart Kennedy thrived in the 1900s when his name became a byword for the literature of “trampdom.” He also produced a piece of radical working class writing, Slavery: Pictures from the Depths (1905), that should have earned him a place in the annals of proletarian literature. But he does not figure in any survey of the field. As one of the submerged, Kennedy knew what life was like in overcrowded unsanitary habitations, tramp wards, workhouses or sweatshops. This article profiles Kennedy, concentrating on the works that still hold an interest for present day readers: Slavery , read against the foil of a later Lancashire classic, Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933); the two road books A Man Adrift (1899) and A Sailor Tramp (1902); and the late Golden Green (1926), a paean to the English countryside.

Pater's Appreciations and the Problem of "Feuillet's La Morte"

Abstract: First published in Macmillan's Magazine in December 1886, Pater's "Feuillet's La Morte " has received little comment. If critics mention it at all, it is only to question Pater's editorial decision, account for it as a response to his fear of public rebuke, or emphasize the essay's lack of substance. It is an entirely different kind of piece than the other essays in the volume, more a typical Victorian book review than a Paterian appreciation. This article offers a solution to the "problem" of "Feuillet's La Morte ." The review functions in Appreciations as a kind of foil or counterpoint to Pater's embrace of Flaubert in "Style." By including in his volume an appreciative review of a writer who aesthetically and politically stands in opposition to French realism, Pater is counterbalancing or complicating the attention he gives to Flaubert, the controversial representative of French realism.

How to Make a Heterosexual Romance Queer: Anna Marsden's Experiment and the Limits of Sexual/Gendered Inversion

Abstract: Anna Marsden’s Experiment builds on the generic conventions of New Woman novels in order to interject a radically queer character who first appears to follow the normative paths of cross dressing within the genre, but this novel plays with audience assumptions and sexological discourse in order to show the limits that still existed within this growing pseudo science. Williams successfully critiques the limited understanding of gender in New Woman fiction, sexology, and British society in general. Anna/Dick cannot be contained or understood singularly as a heterosexual woman, an inverted woman, a heterosexual man, or an inverted man. An academic reclaiming of this novel not only allows for a greater understanding of lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans characters in historical literature, but also provides an excellent case study in the connections between the “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siecle and the nonnormative female experience in early twentieth century modernist fiction.

Forgotten Short Fiction by E. Nesbit and Carmen Sylva: Everything in Moderation

Abstract: This article focuses on the adult short fiction of Carmen Sylva (1843–1916) and Edith Nesbit (1858–1924). Reevaluating their work recovers an important but overlooked subgenre of the short story—moderate short fiction for adults which tried to reconcile elements that were arguably irreconcilable to many Victorian readers. Their more moderate approach to writing “short”—that is, writing that is neither overly conservative nor progressive—engages with a fragmented feminism, one that offers a realistic response to marriage and relationships at the end of the nineteenth century. Consideration of such fiction generates a broader understanding of the period, the cultural anxieties it embodied and the diverse responses it stimulated.

Reading and Misreading the Country House in the Novels of George Gissing: The Dangers of Fiction

Abstract: Deciphering the perceived simplicity of the romance and idealisms of Isabel Clarendon as intentional and self-conscious intimates an entirely different view of the upper-class setting. Decoded, it appears as the site of precarious preset narratives that are precisely disposed to misreading and self-deception. Situating this early novel within the wider context of Gissing's works provides a better account of country house aesthetics than one based on the clear-cut dichotomy between "illusion and reality" that a chronological and biographical reading provokes. The focus of this argument is not to deny the presence of these concepts but rather to challenge the notion of their binary opposition through a rereading of the country house setting

The Problem of Sex in J. M. Barrie's Fiction

Abstract: A euphemistic, biographically supported reading of Tommy’s failure to “love” in Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel , has profoundly affected subsequent analyses of the novels and interpretations of Barrie’s thinking about both sexuality and art. This discussion begins by examining the difference that Barrie establishes between love and sexual passion in his early novels, before showing how he places this difference within a wider theory of human nature, in which sexual passion is both admitted as necessary and worried about as potentially destructive. The implications this has for Barrie’s consideration of artistic sexuality in the Tommy novels are then analysed, revealing the potential dangers of euphemistic readings which erroneously seek meaning from beyond rather than within the text.

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier as Detective Story: Is Dowell a Murderer?

Abstract: The voluminous criticism on The Good Soldier ’s John Dowell has made his thinking a focal point. No one much studies what Dowell actually does in the novel because he presents himself as such a nonentity. One action of his in particular needs consideration—the possibility that Dowell murdered his wife. When one looks closely at the things Dowell actually says about himself, a strong pattern of misdirection and even violence is revealed. The contemporary audience would have known the effects of prussic acid poisoning and wondered if Florence was arranged on her bed or died another way. Only the ignorant would have believed that she accidentally drank prussic acid and then arranged herself on the bed. Ford leaves the true method of Florence’s death up to the reader, but if she died of prussic acid poisoning or a true heart attack, she was cleaned up and “arranged.”

Irish Women Freelance Writers and the Popular Press: An Army Beyond Literary Circles

Abstract: This article considers the publishing careers of a small number of Irish women who worked as freelance journalists and authors in order to explore both their experiences as professional writers and the industry in which they worked. They are an illustrative sample of freelance writers of their era and their careers shed light on this vast, overlooked aspect of media history, especially that of the increasing numbers of women who sought to earn money from their writing in this period. Beginning to understand these women writers is a step towards better understanding the publishing industry commercial press. This article argues there was an army of periodical writers drawn from far beyond literary circles, who wrote while also working as typists or teachers, and who remained disconnected from other writers even as they regularly published stories and articles over several decades.