Day One | April 09th
Panel 1a | Short Fiction
Amy Hurle (Queen’s University Belfast) ‘There is no reason in tangible things’: Creative Education and the Individual in Stella Benson’s Early [Middlebrow] Fiction.
Middlebrow fiction, with its apparent affirmation of stylistic and genre conventions, and largely feminine domestic setting, is a space in which Victorian aesthetics and ideologies appear to have persisted in to the age of modernism, despite the socio-cultural background of unprecedented change. It stands in contrast with high modernism, which is commonly equated with the works of the avant-garde, with its aesthetic experimentation, the dismantling of genre conventions, and its challenge to dominant ideologies. Yet as Christopher Ehland and Cornelia Wächter point out in the introduction to Middlebrow and Gender, 1890-1945, ‘the stability of the dividing line between the avant-garde, or the highbrow, and the middlebrow’ needs reconsideration. The dominance of the perception that middlebrow fiction remained the bulwark of Victorianism, ignores the many areas of intersection between highbrow modernism and the conservative middlebrow. Education was an area in the early twentieth century that did not see much in the way of change or progress, certainly not practically; middle-class women’s education in particular, seemed to remain firmly rooted in its conventional Victorian past, and representations of ideologies and practices of female pedagogy in middlebrow fiction often appeared to reinforce traditional ideologies. Yet, considering that the middlebrow was in fact – as Ehland and Wächter propose - a space which explored issues of stability and disintegration, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the novelist, Stella Benson (1892-1933), negotiated the modernist preoccupation with ontological and epistemological uncertainty in her middlebrow fiction, appearing to advocate a form of creative self-education as a means of negotiating notions of individuality and selfhood. Despite contemporary popularity during her lifetime, Benson has since fallen into obscurity, but writing in 1937, Robin Hyde situated Benson’s books ‘in a world of their own’, identifying her as neither ‘highbrow’ nor ‘lowbrow’ (a statement that calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s unsent letter to the New Statesman). Hyde’s comment is not a derogatory one, indeed she suggests that Benson ‘had an insight into the fatal flaw of twentieth- century construction – its dehumanizing character - and she knew how to reveal it’. Benson idiosyncratically juxtaposes fantasy and reality, creating in her fiction a space in which ‘Secret Worlds’ and ‘Secret Friends’ exist alongside the banalities of everyday life and the posturing of ‘Real People’. Her thematic preoccupation with lost, isolated, and alienated individuals is one she shares with Woolf’s highbrow coterie. Proposing that Benson used the imagination as a way out of the mundanity of real life - and a way of negotiating modern selfhood - this paper will examine Benson’s privileging of creative education as a tool of/in self-knowledge. In doing so, it seeks to situate Benson within current criticism of the middlebrow and intermodernism, demonstrating how her fiction can be seen to bridge the divide been Victorianism and Modernism.
Panel 1a | Short Fiction
Emanuela Ettorre (University of Chieti-Pescara) Between Naturalism and Aestheticism: Hubert Crackanthorpe and the Emergence of the Modernist Short Story.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the work of Hubert Crackanthorpe (1870-1896), a writer who was central to the fin de siècle British debate about realism and naturalism, the status of fiction, and questions of taste in literary representation. Crackanthorpe’s collections of short stories combine a pronounced naturalism in the bleak subject matter of his “documents of hell” (as one critic put it), with a conscious aestheticism, most obviously apparent in his deliberately dispassionate handling of the human predicament his writing opens up. As such, and despite his very brief life – he committed suicide at the age of twenty-six – he becomes a significant figure in the evolution of the modernist short story in Britain.
In his essay “Reticence in Literature”, published on The Yellow Book in July 1894, Crackanthorpe addresses topics such as the significance of realism and naturalism, the claims of art versus morality, and the role of the artist in an age of commodification. Here he discusses the impossibility of separating “the jealous worship of beauty” from the “jealous worship of truth”. By undermining the basis of realism (“Realism as a creed, is as ridiculous as any other literary creed”), Crackanthorpe rejects the theory of art as a scientific mechanism and, in his reading of the moral degeneration of urban spaces at the turn of the century, he instead promotes the creativity of the author and the autonomy of the literary text. If, as Terry Eagleton maintains, “[n]aturalism and aestheticism couple in curious ways”, in Crackanthorpe’s writing the combination of naturalistic procedures and decadent impulses becomes the perfect means to penetrate the desolate land of human relationships, of desires, and negated love. For example, the world of Wreckage (1893) is filled with characters who build their life upon the illusions of a love that is doomed to die, and which degenerates in abject forms of manipulation, seduction, deceit and abandonment. The decadence of humankind is related to the degrading conditions of urban space: Crackanthorpe’s stories are mainly set in the slums, in that “territory of immanent breakdown” inhabited by a population that expresses its malaise pathologically, in sudden fits of rage, states of psycho-physical prostration, an isolation that verges on misanthropy, self-destructive life-choices and suicidal impulses, expressions whose cause seems to oscillate between biological determinism and socio- spatial contamination. As these examples underline, Crackanthorpe’s work clearly anticipates the modernist short story in its pitiless portrait of a society that relinquishes any chance of positivistic ‘redemption’, and that cannot defend itself from the vulgarity of the present.
Panel 1a | Short Fiction
Francesca Massarenti (Ca’Foscari University of Venice) Women’s Experimental Economies in W. Somerset Maugham’s Short Fiction.
Somerset Maugham’s short stories allow for a comprehensive analysis of his approach to different forms of storytelling, their stylistic elements count as prototypical of SM’s work, especially when it comes to balancing characters’ exposition and, consequently, the amount of information made available to readers. SM’s narrators seldom blend in their tale: the most noticeable and frequent narrative devices employed are framed narratives and witnesses’ tales, although different techniques alternate and intersect, such as a propensity to shift focalisation multiple times during a single narrative, as well as an inverse tendency to set a static narrative point of view. Although maintaining, overall, a simple and traditionally structured layout, SM still manages to engage, content-wise, with experimentalism in the arts, double standards in a misogynistic society and the idea of women as fully-fledged artists, as well as legitimate political agents.
SM’s scope encompasses the evolving role of women at the turn of the century and seeks to chart their attempts to partake in the cycle of production and consumption of art: his female characters become striking interpreters of the failures and achievements, pains, visions, limitations and rejections that SM’s fiction so eagerly explores. This paper will analyse a brief selection of short stories – Daisy (1896), The Colonel’s Lady (1946), The Creative Impulse (1926) – drafted and published at different stages of SM’s career, so as to give evidence of his consistent attention towards the life of women throughout his production.
SM’s short prose is a shared repository of deeply held Victorian values merged with cultural trends of the early 20th century, it is steeped in commonly held historical notions (e.g. novel-writing as a big 18th and 19th century feminine “breadwinning” activity), but seems to work on an apparent paradox. In the selected short stories, for instance, wage-earning domestic labour is not menial or family- focussed, but has cultural value: SM’s women, in fact, write experimental poetry and work as performers. It is through such characters that SM develops themes that are recurring in his fiction: the many ways in which women are socially abused, how gossip and slander are used to control women’s bodies and sexuality, how social alienation is a result of the exclusion of women from money-making activities or from managing their own finances.
Openly feminist readings of SM are, indeed, jeopardised by the short stories’ biased stream of information. The paper will argue, however, that SM’s deviated and insufficient narratives might read as tentative, but (crucially) non-disruptive suggestions regarding what innovative ways to read the world might look like. It might, at first, seem counterintuitive, but the male privilege embedded in these narratives, along with their equally male-focused modes of narration, seem precisely the features that allow SM to edge past the fin-de-siècle suspicion towards the so-called New Woman, while simultaneously channelling an anti-Victorian streak in his sympathetic descriptions of women’s crushed rights and denied public and political action. Through a subversive exercise and rewriting of traditionally masculine principles of (narrative) control, SM produces an encouraging, parafeminist, theorisation of a less strictly gendered organisation of society and positive approach to sex and the ways its connected feelings are told.
Panel 1b | Science and Technology
Jessica Gray (University of Kent) Bodies and machines: technology, the typist, and Dracula.
It is a critical commonplace to assert that most nineteenth-century texts, reacting against the march of industrialism, tend towards expressing anti-industrial and technophobic feeling. Machines apparently deaden human subjectivity: in Dickens’ Hard Times, often cited as a novel presenting archetypal anti-industrial sentiment, the factory ‘Hands’ of Coketown are referred to only by the body parts which control the machines, a synecdoche which serves to erase the wholeness of the human operating the machine. But it is worth complicating this one-sided notion of the portrayal of the human-machine relationship. Certainly, anti-machine sentiment is present within a multitude of nineteenth-century novels, reflecting anxieties about the effects of industrialism both on individual workers and, more widely, British society and environment. But arguing that novels from the nineteenth century were exclusively anti-machine disallows a more nuanced portrayal of technology. This paper will seek to problematize the idea of technophobic Victorians suggesting instead that the effects upon subjectivity that technology has were, at times, portrayed as positive. This is not to argue that technology is inherently beneficent: rather, it is to suggest technology is represented as having the power to transform subjectivity in a potentially positive manner. In particular, I will argue that texts exploring the relations between human and machine depict the boundaries between the two as disrupted, traversed, and sometimes porous. In turn, this leads to an exploration of a less-self- contained, singular subjectivity. This alteration to subjectivity is not simply the subject becoming a functional, alienated cog in a machine; but an engaged individual that forms part of a network of humans and machines. This conception of technology connects the Victorians more explicitly to Modernists, who are commonly separated out from their technophobic predecessors and typically regarded as having a more complex, nuanced perspective on the possibilities and dangers of technological innovation. I will discuss this argument with relation to Dracula (1897). In particular, I will focus on Jessica Gray [email protected] the idea of boundaries, and the disruption of boundaries: this is a generic feature of Gothic texts, in which the division between the living and the dead is disrupted; in Dracula in particular, such boundaries are also traversed by the communication technologies that proliferate in the novel. This boundary-crossing is akin also to Donna Haraway’s cyborg, a figure which underlines the ‘leaky distinction’ between such categories as organism and machine. In Dracula, the typewriter, the telegraph and the gramophone all feature as technologies which either push forward or record the plot of the text: it is Mina Harker, with her typewriter, who unites different characters’ narratives into a collective story. The text envisions how machines constitute and construct a technologized subjectivity that leads to a greater connectivity, and ultimately, a collective subjectivity formed through technology.
Panel 1b | Science and Technology
Saskia McCracken (University of Glasgow) Revolution, Evolution, and the Darwinian Politics of Virginia Woolf’s ‘creature Dictator’.
This paper bridges both the Victorian-Modern, and the literature-science divides, by considering Virginia Woolf’s feminist, pacifist polemics through the lens of Charles Darwin’s writing on revolution, evolution, and dictatorships. When Woolf’s London home was bombed in 1940 she retrieved only: ‘Darwin, & the Silver, & some glass and china’. Her writing intimately connects Darwinian animal imagery and fascist politics. Woolf’s pacifist, anti-fascist feminist polemic Three Guineas(1938) uses animal imagery to critique ‘the creature Dictator’, whom she calls a ‘worm’, and ‘a very ugly animal’. Woolf places the Dictator at the bottom of the evolutionary scale, re- appropriating the Social Darwinist rhetoric of the 1930s, and twisting animal imagery to her advantage.
My research builds on the current animal turn in literary criticism, particularly regarding the field of literature and science studies, which is concerned with challenging the assumption that the two disciplines are separate. Critics including Gillian Beer have demonstrated Woolf’s extensive engagement with Darwin’s writings, revealing the bridge between one of the most significant thinkers of the Victorian period, and a major modernist writer. Given this bridge, I will consider how Woolf’s ‘creature Dictator’ was shaped by Darwin’s fascination with the ‘extraordinary’ Argentinian dictator General Rosas, whom he met during his voyage on the HMS Beagle in the early 19th century. I will also consider how Darwin’s book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms (1881) – in which he calls worms ‘small agencies’, ‘low in scale’ but of ‘some interest’ – might inform our understanding of the worm imagery Woolf uses to describe the figure of the dictator. By addressing these concerns I hope to provide new insights into Woolf’s pacifist engagement with Darwin’s works, and the interconnection of revolution and evolution in both Woolf and Darwin’s animal tropes, as well as offering a literary reading of the two writers that engages with the current animal turn in literary criticism.
Panel 1b | Science and Technology
Boyarkina Iren (University of Rome) The Art of James Joyce and the Narratives by H.G Wells and Olaf Stapledon.
This paper analyzes the works by Wells and Stapledon, artists who are neither strictly ‘Victorian’ nor wholly ‘Modernist’ and examines the change in their style at the turn of the century due to the influence of modernist artists like James Joyce.
This paper focuses on the direct influences of Joycean themes, techniques and style in the works of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, the fathers of English science fiction. Careful analysis reveals that the influence of Joyce on these authours is more substantial than it seems at first sight. To demonstrate this, the paper analyzes The Shape of Things to Come and The Last and First Men by H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, respectively. The paper discusses the aesthetic, scientific and textual relationship between the Victorian and Modernists periods manifested in the abovementioned texts, difficult and somehow forgotten.
The paper investigates the way in which Joyce influenced works by Wells and Stapledon. It demonstrates that both writers shared Joyce’s rejection of the contemporary social order and Christianity. Like Joyce, they both employed some innovative narrative techniques of Modernism, such as an unreliable narrator, the use of multiple first-person narrators, the narrative assembled from disparate and sometimes irreconcilable documents, frame structure, dislocation of time sequence, etc. Stapledon was more inclined to experiment with multiple focalization, like Joyce in Ulysses, he employed eighteen points of view (on the evolution of human species). Both writers shared Joyce’s idea about inadequacy of human language and the necessity to look for experiments and alternatives. Like Joyce, both writers paid tribute to aesthetism. Stapledon did it by employing highly metaphoric and symbolic language, Wells – by using proto-cinematic metaphors and techniques. Music and musicality plays an important role in fiction of both writers, as it does in the works of Joyce. Hence, while it is hardly possible to consider Wells and Stapledon typical modernist writers, their fiction evidently demonstrates some characteristic features of Modernism, and in particular, some influence of Joyce.
Panel 1c | Little Magazines
Brittany Moster (University of Birmingham) Sleeping with the Enemy: Magazines, the Market, and Furniture Advertisements.
The magazine Rhythm (published from 1911 to 1913; later titled the Blue Review), is considered by some to be the first English little magazine 1 , a description which seems to secure the periodical as a firmly modernist one. Started by editors John Middleton Murry and Michael Sadler while they were undergraduates at Oxford, and including writer Katherine Mansfield as a contributor and editor and Fauvist painter J. D. Fergusson as art editor, Rhythm’s 14 issues display strikingly modern art – in fact, the magazine was the first in Britain to publish Picasso – as well as modernist literary contributions. Interestingly, and in direct contrast to its contemporary publications, Rhythm also printed uniquely modern advertisements. The traditional understanding of modernists as being firmly opposed to the mass market and popular culture is more recently being questioned by a number of scholars, and Rhythm provides a unique insight into the modernist/market struggle. From issue No. 3, the magazine ran regular advertisements for a number of items and services, but, notably, rather than featuring ads which appeared identically in several magazines, Rhythm’s advertisements were crafted by its own artists, making these adverts unique to the magazine and, crucially, tailored to the magazine’s readers. One of Rhythm’s largest advertisers was Heal & Son furniture store, a business which still uses its own long history and, particularly, its lengthy advertising history, to market itself to current potential buyers. This paper will use the modernist platform of Rhythm to examine the ways in which the magazine’s editors chose to differentiate their advertisements from other Heal & Son ads, both earlier and contemporary. Rhythm’s Heal & Son advertisements are artistically unique and visually stimulating, and the arrangement and content of the advertisements suggests an attempt by Rhythm’s editors to 1 Malcolm Bradbury, ‘“Rhythm” and “The Blue Review”’, The Times Literary Supplement, 25 April 1968, pp. 423-424 (p. 423). Moster 2 blur the lines between magazine content and advertisement, and to challenge traditional expectations of ads, particularly those of established businesses. By comparing Heal &a Son ads from various publications and from a range of years, I will examine Rhythm’s deliberate attempts to push back against earlier, Victorian forms of advertising and publishing in order to market Heal & Son furniture, and Rhythm itself, to a specific, modern audience. Further, I will acknowledge the significance of advertising as a valuable source of research for examining changing expectations and understandings of the mass market, print culture, and the relationship between the sometimes violently opposed, sometimes happily married, and always coexisting camps of art and commerce.
Panel 1c | Little Magazines
Helena Goodwyn (St Andrews) A ‘living link’: The Transnational Magazine at the Turn of the Century.
The journalist and influential editor W. T. Stead launched the Review of Reviews in 1890: ‘to establish a periodical circulating throughout the English-speaking world’. By the end of the nineteenth century, advancements in printing, communication and transport technologies had created the conditions for such an attempt to establish transnational, periodical reader communities that would reflect a newly internationalised sense of the ‘English-speaking race’ (Stead: 1890). Following the successful launch of the Review Stead quickly established the American Review of Reviews in 1891 and the Australasian Review of Reviews in 1892. In its cover image, the Review of Reviews circles the world, reflecting its editor’s belief that the new venture provided a ‘common centre for the inter-communication of ideas’. As an ‘index’ magazine reproducing ‘all the best articles in the magazines and reviews’ (Stead: 1890) Stead viewed his monthly periodical as a repository of a kind of ‘deep present’, through which boundaries of space between nations, and of time between the necessarily intermittent nature of periodical publication, could be erased. In ‘To All English-Speaking Folk’, the magazine’s opening address, he argued that: ‘A daily newspaper is practically unreadable beyond twenty- four hours’ distance by rail of its printing office. Even a weekly, although capable of wider distribution, is of little use as a circulating medium of thought in all the continents. If anything published in London is to be read throughout the English-speaking world, it must be a monthly’ (Stead: 1890). This paper considers how this early attempt at creating transnational readership communities was constructed. These magazines bore witness to dramatic changes in understandings of world order, evidence of which can be found in their content, and through analysis of how they responded to each other as supposed sister publications. The aim of the Review was to create communicative pathways across geographical divides. This was a radical reimagining of the parameters of the periodical press, and evidence that Stead was beginning to conceive of the possibilities of print journalism as an unending narrative of world events, as well as an international forum for the sharing of knowledge and ideas. This paper considers the Review of Reviews as a periodical that attempted to cross boundaries of time and space, to create an international community of readers who saw themselves as part of Stead’s imperial ‘family’ project.
Panel 1c | Little Magazines
Alex Grafen (University College London) Zangwill in Renesans; Zangwill in Voices.
This paper looks at how the work of Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) entered two little magazines in the aftermath of the First World War: Voices (1919-1921) and Renesans (1920). Both magazines were published in London, were concerned with spiritual regeneration through culture, and there was even some cross-over in writers: Stephen Winsten, Louis Golding, and Zangwill himself. However, there were key differences, the most striking being language: while Voices was in English, Renesans was in Yiddish and especially concerned with how to renew a specifically Jewish art, and what such an art might look like. My paper addresses how Zangwill, as a senior literary and political figure, was accommodated in the pages of the magazines, and the different forms that accommodation took when in English and in Yiddish. In both, Zangwill provided ties back to a pre-war and Victorian period, and an example of a novelist unusually invested in the plight of residents in the Jewish East End. On the one hand, for small-scale publications, he was valuable as an established and eminent supporter; on the other hand, his seniority meant he held an uneasy position in magazines that heralded a new beginning. Where Zangwill was treated with reverence in Voices as an example of integrity and champion of suppressed voices, albeit implicitly an ineffective one, his position was less protected in Renesans, where his Territorialism was one model of a Jewish project of regeneration in competition with others. I will particularly focus on the appearance of Zangwill’s article ‘Are the Jews a Nation?’ in both magazines: while in Voices it appears and then fades without much effect, in Renesans it initiated an exchange with the author and Zionist leader, Shmarya Levin, whose political project was in competition with Zangwill’s. In looking at Zangwill, a writer generally grouped with Victorian novelists, as an active participant in a political debate and publication context that have become closely identified with political and cultural modernism, I hope to show a period transition that was more complicated and conflicted than it is often represented. By using Yiddish alongside English language material, I will also challenge the monoglot model of London’s literary history.
Panel 2a | Health and Care
Robyn Jakeman (Birkbeck) ‘The Beautiful Future’: Futurism(s) and Discourses of Degeneration and Regeneration in Britain’s Pre- War Years.
This paper considers a futurist moment in Britain in the pre-war era, which, I argue, was regarded by many cultural figures to be a transitional stage in British literature between decadent and modern modes of literature. I begin with a concise summary of the Italian Futurist presence in London in the years before the First World War, and go on to briefly consider the reception of the movement between 1910 and 1914. Contrary to much Anglo-American scholarship, which overwhelmingly underscores the negative response of the British press, my paper demonstrates the often- enthusiastic reception of the Futurist programme in newspapers, and in particular by art and literary critics. Although one (critically overused) review by P.G. Konody lampooned the March 1912 Futurist Exhibition at the Sackville Gallery as a ‘nightmare exhibition’, he also wrote that ‘Futurism has, from the moment of its introduction to England, come to be as completely misunderstood and unjustly derided as it has been on the Continent’. Walter Sickert also wrote in positive terms of the Futurist programme, stating that ‘the movement is one from which we in England have a good deal to learn’, and that the ‘idea at the root of the Futurist movement is health itself […] [which] is based on active concern with the present and the future, and not on hypnotism by the past’. Taking this concept of ‘health’ forward in my paper, I argue that Futurism’s appeal for British cultural figures derived largely from its interactions with and transformation of ‘Victorian’ discourses of degeneration and individual decline, which did not end with the close of the nineteenth century: in fact, the unexpectedly poor performance of Britain in the second Boer War ensured that these discourses proliferated long into the first decade of the twentieth century. Futurist rhetoric of health, vitality, and regeneration, rather than constituting a complete break with the past, thus actually forms a continuation and transformation of these discourses. This can be seen in the writings of Wyndham Lewis and Harold Monro, which posit in quite different ways an ‘Anglo-futurism’: Lewis asserted futurism to be ‘Anglo-Saxon Civilisation’; while Monro, in a 1913 issue of his magazine Poetry and Drama, declared the set to be ‘futurists’ and wrote that ‘[l]ong ago, before we heard of the Italian Movement, we conceived the desire to “serve, worship, and obey the beautiful Future”. For both writers, their attraction to Futurism derives from a drive to become ‘modern’, even as they connect futurism much more than their Italian counterparts to issues of the past, and place futurism in the context of a historical continuum. The term ‘futurism’ thus becomes an idea — or, as Monro terms it, a ‘condition of mind’ — that transcends the name of a small, distinct group of Italian writers and artists, and becomes a short but significant transitional moment in British literature: one that forms part of a blurred boundary between the Victorian-Modernist divide.
Panel 2a | Health and Care
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (University of Oxford) Eyesight and the ‘modern man’: Literature on the Move, c. 1880-1910.
One popular ‘avocation’ of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was travel – rail travel in particular. As railway travel grew in popularity, so did the pastime of reading on trains. Railway reading was not, however, a pursuit to be taken lightly; it was one of the ‘myriad of things’ responsible for ‘taxing’ modern eyesight. Readers of The Girl’s Own Paper were cautioned: ‘Do not work in the gloaming, nor in too great a glare of light, and do not read in a railway carriage’ (1881). Bateman’s optician’s practice featured an image of railway readers in their ‘eyestrain’ leaflet, warning that ‘when you have to hold the Newspaper or Book further away, or closer to, the face, than 12 inches’ it ‘would be wise’ to consult them (1898). These warnings gave rise to commercial opportunities, with several patents being filed for automatic sight testing machines. These machines, which soon became ubiquitous in train stations, enabled railway readers to order a pair of bespoke spectacles at the start of their journey then collect them on their way home or have them delivered direct to their door, thus saving themselves from the ill effects of eyestrain. As well as investigating the relationship between fin de siècle railway travel, eyecare, and the embodied experience of reading, this paper explores the kinds of texts that commuters chose to read. Through examining the catalogues of major suppliers of railway reading matter, such as W.H. Smith’s and Routledge’s Railway Library, I analyse some of the popular texts of the period, paying particular attention to works of fiction – such as detective stories and sensation novels – which reflect back upon the themes of railways, reading, and the eyesight of ‘modern man’. Given the theme of this conference, the profuse use of the term ‘modern’ in texts relating to both eyecare and railway travel will not be overlooked; I shall analyse the different uses of this term in order to better understand the rhetorical role of ‘modern’ in the fin de siècle.
Panel 2a | Health and Care
Cristina Díaz (University of Oviedo) SEX IS ALL OVER THE PLACE! Women writing on sex with Queen Victoria and touring and selling it between the wars.
It is generally acknowledged that Victorians were prudish, though during these years and the ones that follow three circumstances shaped sexuality in Britain and had an impact in our global and contemporary sexed bodies. Lucy Bland (2001) highlights 1864 as the year when the sex taboo was broken in Britain because the Contagious Diseases Act was passed. The State, in an attempt to put an end to the spread of venereal diseases, enhanced the sexual and social behaviour of certain citizens. Sex was put on the spot also through public trials related to homosexuality. Oscar Wilde, Maud Allan or the Cleveland Street Scandal appeared for weeks in the newspapers and magazines of the time and revealed a sexual hidden world as Lesley Hall (2000) has studied. Finally, sexology and marriage manuals of the Inter-war years created the limits of what was morally acceptable. Heterosexual relationships were codified as the normal and other forms of relationships were pathologized and underrepresented , especially those practised by women.
These circumstances revealed that sex was spoken in both periods, though it was highly biased. However, Dagmar Herzog (2005, 261) , historian of sexuality, has explained that ideology as well as sexuality works through, not despite contradictions. Thus, despite the sexual framework of marital and heteronormative sex that was promoted, all three instances were contested and shaped by the feminist struggle as it will be analyzed in this paper.
Different sex discourses were shaping directly and indirectly the bodies and minds of the people of these periods . This paper analyses the changes that feminist women were bringing on when talking about sex. The women that I have chosen are authors, researchers and activists ranging from Annie Besant, Elizabeth Wolstonholme Elmy, Dora Rusell to marriage manual authors such as Stella Browne, Helena Wright and Isabel Hutton and authors such as Margaret Oliphant, Mary Ward, Naomi Mitchison and Mina Loy. How did they explain the intricacies of sex and bodies? Are they inclusive or exclusive in their approaches? Do they prescribe or reflect behaviour? These are some of the questions that will be answered that will reflect on the impact that these writings had and still have in our sexed bodies.
Panel 2b | The Visual Arts
Judy Harris (Goldsmiths) Fairies, Ghouls and Sprites: Vachel Lindsay’s Utopian Film Theory.
Vachel Lindsay’s utopian conception of film as an art form which could revive a diminished folk- imagination calls into question many of the orthodoxies of film theory. Rather than merely anachronistic, his work enables us to reconsider what have become accepted cinematic dogmas.
The field of film theory has been heavily informed by the ‘modernity thesis’ which situates film as the emblematic artform of modernity, an analysis which privileges its urban context and industrial character. This approach is evident in the writings of Classical film theorists such as Vertov, Eisenstein and Epstein as well as the key figures of the Frankfurt School. Subsequently, a substantial corpus of theoretical texts situate film as a contributing agent (or the corresponding cultural medium) to the formulation of an urban, disenchanted, fragmented subject as can be found in the writings of Miriam Hansen, Tom Gunning, David Nye and Leo Charney.
While valuable, this privileging of cinema as an industrial art form irrevocably tied to the machine age has obscured its relationship to regional cultures, folk practices and artisanal modes of production. Lindsay’s work enables us to begin to explore these hidden relationships. Lindsay wrote one of the first theoretical texts on film The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) yet his work is often overlooked. While the field has seen wave after wave of excavations of the work of early film theorists including Epstein, Arnheim, Canudo and Balázs, Lindsay’s work has remained largely unexamined. His effusive writing style and his fervent utopianism, not to mention his penchant for unicorns, surely contribute to the resistance of film scholars to seriously engage with his work. However I approach his apparent naiveté as enabling him to imagine a future for cinema which would be impossible to conceive of today.
Drawing on Lindsay’s letters, prose, poetry, film theory and a range of archival material I will present the role of film in his utopian project, including his demand for a cinema of ‘fairy splendour’ which could bring the atmosphere of Arthur Rackham and Willy Pogany to the screen. I will set out the techniques and styles which critics and theorists have traditionally dismissed as ‘clumsy’, ‘embarrassing’ or, worse, ‘theatrical’ yet which were embraced by Lindsay such as the use of masks, stylisation, ornamentation and symbolism. This paper will also examine the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement on his work, specifically how the ideas of William Morris and John Ruskin inform Lindsay’s concept of an artisanal filmmaking practice. Lindsay’s work can offer us more than a wistful excursion into a failed utopian project. When engaged with on its own terms it offers a vision of an alternate future for the medium of film, directing us toward unrealized cinematic practices.
Panel 2b | The Visual Arts
Lydia Miller (University of York) Forging an Identity: Ambrose McEvoy and the Lost Period of British Portraiture.
‘Then in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten. Victorianism had been defeated…’ (Yeats 1936).
In 1900, an artificial cultural divide formed between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. This divide has been used throughout modern art history, to separate Victorianism from Modernism and has subsequently led to the exclusion of an entire generation of successful British artists from the art historical cannon. Ambrose McEvoy (1877-1927) is one of those excluded artists. Like many artists of his generation, McEvoy trained at the Slade School of Art and forged a prosperous career between the 1890s and 1920s. He became a hugely successful portraitist in his lifetime but subsequently gained no posthumous recognition for his achievements – even the year of his birth is incorrectly documented as 1878.
With McEvoy’s continuous experimentation with form and colour over a relatively short career, he represents an exciting and fluctuating time in British portraiture. A handful of McEvoy’s portraits can be contextualised through a direct comparison with the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) of the previous generation, who was not only an inspiration to McEvoy but was also a close family friend. Two of McEvoy’s portraits are named after Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ dating from the 1870s, Blue and Gold and Grey and Silver (inverted by McEvoy to Silver and Grey). Silver and Grey, the first Whistlerian portrait painted by McEvoy in 1915, is thought to have been inspired by a review in The Times, ‘A Whistler Exhibition’ dated 1 st June 1915. This solo exhibition, dedicated to Whistler twelve years after his death, aimed to raise funds for the Professional Classes War Relief Council. Although the review is critical of Whistler’s work, The Times article concludes with Grey and Silver, ‘no one could imitate that...the poet who did succeed now and again among many failures, and when he succeeds we forget the failures’ (The Times 1915).
Reclaiming the titles, tones and techniques of Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ from 1915, McEvoy aimed to both challenge and pay homage to the controversial leader of nineteenth-century aestheticism. Although already a well-known portrait painter by 1915, McEvoy was on the cusp of becoming ‘one of the most original painters of the age’ (Newall 1974). The vital revisiting of Whistler’s ‘nocturnes’ allowed McEvoy to further develop his succinct style and forge a new identity in modern British portraiture.
Panel 2b | The Visual Arts
Judith Stapleton (Yale University) Out of Time, Out of Place: The Dreaming Worlds of Edward Burne-Jones and Viktor Vasnestsov.
This paper seeks to redeem the Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones from the “undertow of fin-de- siècle melancholy” he is so often mired within. Here, I challenge the notion that the aesthetic indebtedness of this “artist-dreamer” to the historic, mythic, and fantastic is belated, escapist, or feminized. Rather, in considering Burne-Jones’s explorations of ahistorical timelessness as a project that inherently challenges notions of modernity and the avant-garde, I explore this artist’s oeuvre as essentially transnational, transhistorical, and transgressive.
Recent attempts to situate Burne-Jones within a cannon of modernism have focused on his link to the socialist politics of the Arts & Crafts, on his role as a lynchpin between mid-century Pre- Raphaelitism and fin-de-siècle Symbolism, and on the potential for his anti-industrial ideology to “smite a sleeping world awake.” My paper expands these avenues of scholarship, exploring how Burne-Jones was received and reflected upon in a larger trans-national context, and in particular, in the art and criticism of turn-of-the-century Russia. By examining the artist’s Russian reception, I explore a network of influence and intersections which reveal the potential for the artist’s “escapist” projects to fundamentally reformulate notions of historical and national periodization.
In particular, I focus on the stylistic and ideological similarities between Burne-Jones’ The Legend of Brair Rose and the Russian neo-folk artist Viktor Vasnetsov’s “Epic Poem of Seven Tales,” which includes its own Sleeping Beauty canvas. Through a comparison of contemporary reactions to both monumental projects, it becomes evident that these self-proclaimed “timeless” and “ornamental” works constituted in their moment a powerfully subversive discursive mode. In their success at weaving together the past and the future, the national and the universal, the real and the dreamt, both artists assert the power of aestheticized visions to project politicized hopes for the future.
The potential of such projects to feed new avant-garde practices is evident in the pre-Soviet display of Burne-Jones’ work, in particular within the Moscow collection of the merchant patron Sergei Shchukin. Here, the artist’s 1886 tapestry of the Adoration of the Magi appears as a lynchpin of the collector’s home display, self-consciously hung among the works of Henri Matisse and Paul Gauguin at the center of his collection. This display, famous for molding the aesthetic language of avant- garde artists Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, posits its own articulation of a modernist canon, one in which stylistic divides appear inchoate.4 In this “giant continuing wager” of how to articulate the past and the future, and of how to self-consciously construct an art historical narrative of modernism, Burne-Jones appears to the modern eye as intriguingly out of place.5 Exploring such apparent curatorial dissonances and artistic parallels reveals how the timeless and the avant-garde might interbreed at the turn of the century, an act which dismantles rigid distinctions between “past” and “future,” “east” and “west.”
Panel 2c | Legacy and Influence
Matthew Holliday (University of Nottingham) ‘My Only Drug’: Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, and the Transmutation of Grief.
In June 1940, as Nazi forces invaded Paris and German bombs grew closer to Rodmell, Virginia Woolf found comfort in the writing of William Wordsworth, ‘my only drug’ (Diaries, V, p. 295). The medicinal quality of Wordsworth’s verse has had many disciples—from John Ruskin to John Stuart Mill, from Matthew Arnold to Leslie Stephen. Woolf’s Wordsworthian inheritance came directly from her father. In this paper I demonstrate how Stephen’s reading of Wordsworth, and his faith in the transmutation of sorrow into strength, contributed to Virginia Woolf’s life‐writing, specifically the autobiographical essay, ‘Sketch of the Past’.
Beginning with ‘Wordsworth’s Ethics’ (1876) and the so‐called ‘Mausoleum Book’ (ed. Bell, 1977), I illustrate how Stephen encouraged his children to ‘quicken the feeling that remained’, following their mother’s death in 1895. I then establish Woolf’s circulation of grief, tracing each attempt to rewrite Julia Stephen’s death, concluding with the ‘Sketch of the Past’. In doing so, I argue for a historicist reading of Woolf’s work, participating in the developing field of Romanticism, posterity and mourning, and recent discussions concerning Romantic continuities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Panel 2c | Legacy and Influence
Jodie Marley (University of Nottingham) A Mystic “Tradition”? A Study of the Esoteric Influences and Mystic Inheritance of George William Russell and W. B. Yeats.
My paper will focus on the early poetry and mystic writings of George William Russell – primarily those before 1900 – and their relationship to W. B. Yeats’s work and activities of the same period. Russell is severely underrepresented in current and past scholarship on Yeats, as well as in literary scholarship on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century more widely.
I will consider Russell and Yeats as the inheritors of a greater mystic tradition, following in the footsteps of such writers and thinkers as Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, Emanuel Swedenborg, and William Blake centuries earlier, as well as examining the influence of broader spiritual/heretic traditions of Gnosticism and Theosophy on the two authors’ works. I will additionally challenge the contention between definitions of mysticism and occultism perpetrated by literary scholars. Mysticism and occultism are often separated into two distinct traditions in literary criticism, despite the inherent and historically consistent crossover between the two strands of the thought. Nowhere is the coexistent influence of both mysticism and occultism more prevalent than in both Yeats’ and Russell’s work, written in the transitory period between Victorian spiritualism and the organised occult tradition exemplified by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The critical boundary between mystic and occult practices is one that many Yeats scholars in particular often seem more concerned with creating rather than blurring, a phenomenon also apparent to this day in scholarship on William Blake, who was a preceding influence on both Russell’s and Yeats’s literary and mystic output.
The writers’ correspondence emphasises their reciprocal influence on one another, which affected both writers’ output – both were reading Blake at the time Yeats was writing his three volume study on Blake and Blake’s symbolism and mystic/occult influences, and both were writing their earliest poetry collections concurrently – Yeats’s first poetry collection is in fact dedicated to Russell. My paper will also examine the divergences of thought and mysticism in practice in Russell’s and Yeats’s work, the question to what ends each used their mystic and esoteric experiences in their writing and how their philosophies differ in spite of their shared inheritance of a specific mystic tradition.
Yeats is, in literary scholarship, canonically inseparable from Modernist mysticism and occult practices, so to examine Russell’s influence on his work at the time will shed new light on both Yeats’s work and the conceptions of late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophies surrounding mystic and occult practices. The prevalence of mystic influence at their time of writing also further emphasises the importance of a field of study that is often neglected and misunderstood in wider criticism.
Panel 2c | Legacy and Influence
Hannah Roche (University of York) The Trapeze Effect: Djuna Barnes’s Victorian Modernism.
With shifting pronouns, precarious labels, and a narrative structure that refuses to be ‘straight’, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) deserves its reputation as one of modernism’s most demanding texts. Yet for all its aesthetic originality, stylistic imagination, and thematic complexity – not to mention its bold sexual politics – Nightwood owes as much to the literary past as it does to modernist innovation. It is revealing that Nightwood’s heroine, Robin Vote, name-checks Catherine Heathcliff as she ponders ‘women out of literature’: perhaps surprisingly, Barnes considered Wuthering Heights (1847) to be ‘the greatest story of love ever written’. Symbolically, the trajectory from past to future in Barnes’s novel is not linear but rather oscillatory: as she advances from one relationship to the next, Robin is thrust repeatedly towards the past. Baron Felix Volkbein observes that ‘[t]here was in [Robin’s] every movement a slight drag, as if the past were a web about her, as there is a web of time about a very old building’.
Offering an altogether new reading of literary ‘drag’, this paper exposes Nightwood’s as-yet- unacknowledged debt to popular novels by Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins. I propose not only that Nightwood borrows heavily from Victorian fiction, but also that Barnes’s allusions to the recent literary past represent a performance of the Freudian bisexual experience and its curious suspension in childhood. Freud’s theory of innate bisexuality – the claim that ‘freedom to range equally over male and female objects […] is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop’ – clearly applies to the ‘wandering’ Robin. But setting Robin aside, there are more subtle ways in which Nightwood marks a return to the past. By revisiting the novels that she read in her own adolescence – the novels that constitute modernism’s ‘embarrassing’ infancy – Barnes diverts readers’ attention backward. Like a playful child, Barnes hides clues to the Victorian texts that helped to bring Nightwood to maturity.
Panel 3a | Art Beyond Words
Nathan Waddell (University of Birmingham) Beethoven, Dorothy Richardson, and Musicology.
Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence (1915-67) repeatedly alludes to the music and the cultural significance of Ludwig van Beethoven. For Miriam Henderson, the organizing consciousness of the sequence, Beethoven is not only a touchstone of artistic value, but also one of the cultural markers in response to which her developing sense of self is defined. Pilgrimage in this regard already clearly does enough work to reveal the artificiality of clear- cut distinctions between literary modernism and its nineteenth-century past, with Richardson’s literary response to modernity emerging from even as it seeks new ways to understand and register one of that past’s most significant composers. In this paper I will propose a new way of understanding that relationship with regard to two lines of influence: Richardson’s implied response to late-Victorian literary depictions of Beethoven-playing women pianists; and her engagement with the idioms of nineteenth-century musicology, specifically the dividing of Beethoven’s music into three phases (the so-called early, middle, and late periods). My claim is that Pilgrimage in these respects contends with the determining effects of two very different kinds of convention: one literary, the other musico- critical. But more importantly it is, I think, quantitatively different in kind to the apparently very similar treatments of these conventions in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), both of which draw on Beethoven’s music to flesh out their claims about women’s independence.
My argument in this paper will be that in light of the above it is neither Forster nor Woolf who deserves the full force of our attention, but Richardson, a writer who offers the most persuasive assessment not only of the terms of the so-called Victorian piano-girl ‘myth’, but also of the musico- historical strategies with which Forster and Woolf chose to contest it. It is in Pilgrimage that the implications of the relationship between pianism and a woman’s burgeoning selfhood are most compellingly explored, not least because of the multi-volume scope of the work in which it is dramatized. Pilgrimage demonstrates Richardson’s centrality to Beethovenian modernism. Moreover, it suggests that Richardson was engaged in an implied dialogue with her modernist peers, one that means we should revise the terms of Beethovenian modernism’s relationship with its musicological precursors.
Panel 3a | Art Beyond Words
Artemis Yagou (Deutsches Museum) Geometry and Colour across the Victorian-Modernist Divide.
Play constitutes a domain which arguably reflects in miniature form the values, aspirations and fears of a given society; construction sets are toys inspired specifically by the architectural and engineering environment. A large variety of such toys were developed and widely used in Europe during the Victorian and Modernist periods; they were expressing both the rising importance of childhood as well as the preoccupation with mechanisation and technology, which fascinated and overwhelmed the respective societies. Examples of construction toys will be used as a starting point in order to explore the idea of a Victorian-Modernist divide.
The wooden ship toy of 1923 by Bauhaus student Alma Siedhoff-Buscher is one of the icons of modernist design; its abstract, geometric pieces in primary colours are often viewed as typical of the experimental and progressive nature of modernism. Around the same time, the architect Bruno Taut created the Dandanah, an idiosyncratic toy made of colourful glass blocks which may be considered as a powerful expression of modernism’s utopian aspects. However, examples of toy design from the 19th century demonstrate that the exploration of the visual language of geometry and the bold use of colours in toys were not exclusive to 20th century modernism. The most characteristic case in point is that of the Tesselated Pastime created in 1843 by Henry Cole, the design reformer and manager of the Great Exhibition. The Tesselated Pastime, consisting of colourful mosaic tiles, connected aesthetic sensibilities with an interest in mechanisation and in novel consumption practices. A similar set of triangular pieces in primary colours, made in Germany around 1850 and imported to England, was entitled “New Architect” and described as a “transformation toy”. Both these examples are contemporary to the unconventional publication of Euclid by mathematician Oliver Byrne in 1847, a work using multi-colour diagrams and geometric symbols. Through the analysis of the aforementioned examples, construction sets may be employed as an appropriate point of departure in order to discuss and possibly challenge the neat separation between the Victorian and Modernist periods. The use of a geometric and colourful visual language across the perceived boundary suggests a more complex picture and a flow of ideas that overlap and co-exist.
Panel 3a | Art Beyond Words
Rob Harris (University of Bristol) ‘The Instant Made Eternity’: Arthur Symons’s Impressionism.
Arthur Symons is remembered mainly as an interpreter and promoter of successive French literary movements for an Anglophone readership, and his critical work The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) is now routinely credited with having been a formative influence on T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Less well-known is his art criticism. By considering his poetry and literary criticism alongside his essays on ‘The Painting of the Nineteenth Century’, Auguste Rodin and J. A. M. Whistler, I will suggest that there are important congruencies between Symons’s theory of the poetic ‘symbol’ (which elsewhere becomes synonymous with what he calls the literary ‘impression’) and his conception of Impressionism in painting and sculpture. Illustrating the continuities between them, I will further argue that considering Symons’s verbal alongside his visual ‘impression’ is useful not just to an understanding of Symons’s own work but also to a more nuanced account of what Daniel Albright calls the ‘panaesthetic’ transition between Aestheticism at the fin de siècle and early Modernism.
Drawing on responses to French Impressionism among English critics in the 1890s, I will suggest that Symons’s championship of Whistler and Rodin over Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne is typical of his art-critical milieu, but also inflected by the earlier aestheticism of Walter Pater. I will highlight Symons’s sharp distinction between two types of Impressionism: between Monet’s ‘shorthand note, which the reporter has not even troubled to copy out’, and what Symons, borrowing from Robert Browning, calls the ‘instant made eternity’, which takes on an ‘incalculable aspect, as of a thing which has always existed and must always go on existing’. I will link his disavowal of the former artistic effect to the anti- pleinairisme of the recently established New English Art Club, and his promotion of the latter to Pater’s ambiguous theory of ‘impressions’ registered with ‘the finest senses’ (as opposed to with ‘the roughness of the eye’). Drawing on this distinction between a ‘rough’ ‘scientific’ notation of a moment in time from an ‘artistic’ ‘gesture’ which suggests ‘the deeper meaning of things evident’, I will then illustrate briefly how the rhetoric Symons used to articulate his idea of the ‘evocative’ aesthetic impression helped to shape Ezra Pound’s theory (or theories) of Imagism.
Stressing the continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics without ignoring the latter’s divergences from the former, then, my paper will contribute to the ongoing critical reassessment of Modernism’s Victorian inheritance, and to our understanding of early Modernism’s debt to Aestheticism in particular.
Panel 3a | Art Beyond Words
Helena Esser (Birkbeck) Eminent Adventurers: Desert Romance, Imperial Critique, and the not-so-‘Modern’ Gaze in Under Two Flags (1867 and 1936).
Scholarly discourse, while keenly aware of the somewhat arbitrary temporal limitations suggested by the term ‘Victorian’ as the period between 1837 and 1901, or larger concepts such as ‘the long nineteenth century’ from 1800 to 1914, have seldom investigated early ‘Victorian’ legacies beyond Modernist re-evaluations such as Lytton Stratchey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Alongside of what is often perceived as the liberal, literary, modernist avant-garde shaking off their predecessors’ stuffy, overbearing attitudes, however, we may find a continued popularity of Victorian adventures in the ‘modern’ medium film. Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, beloved stories such as R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Anthony Hope’s Prisoner of Zenda (1894), or Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) were adapted for the screen two or three times each. In my paper, I want to examine the complex transhistorical connections between Victorian adventure and early film by providing an analysis of one such popular novel and its surviving filmic adaptation: Ouida’s Under Two Flags (1867), though largely forgotten today, was widely read and revered by eminent Victorians such as John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the Queen herself. Her fiction was praised by aestheticist figures often hailed as proto-modernist innovators such as G.S. Street, Max Behrboom, or Oscar Wilde. This, and the fact that Under Two Flags inspired 1920s desert adventures such as P.C. Wren’s Beau Geste (1924), make her novel and its fourth 1936 adaptation (dir. Frank Lloyd) especially interesting material to investigate in this context. The story of a London dandy escaping a scandal by joining the French army in Algiers at once affirmed and undermined ideas of Imperial romance or Victorian heroic masculinities. It thus provides complex critiques that its screen adaptation omits in favour of a nostalgic perspective on an Oriental space made popular by the travel narratives of Gertrude Bell or T.E. Lawrence. Ouida’s boyish heroine, the French- Algerian vivandière Cigarette, who, as a transgressive, but spirited young woman might have become a model for an emancipated ‘modern’ woman in the 1936 adaptation, is imagined as a tragic tomboy. The ‘modern’ adaptation exhibits, in many ways, a more conservative reading of the Victorian novel by which it was inspired and its allure for 1930s cinema, thereby providing a useful example of complicated transhistorical relationships, transformations, and re- imaginations that transcend a simplistic Victorian-Modernist division.
Panel 3b | Locating Edwardian Culture
Naomi Carle (Independent) Romance, Realism and Edwardianism.
In 1884 Henry James published his artistic manifesto, “The Art of Fiction” in response to the wildly different lecture of the same title delivered at the Royal Institute by Walter Besant. R. L. Stevenson, in turn, replied with “A Humble Remonstrance”, triggering a critical debate between Romance and Realism that arguably began a new era of literary criticism and craftsmanship. These essays addressed important and enduring literary questions which were by no means new, but the rigor and scope of their exchange had a greater intensity than had gone before, and was clearly reflected in their respective fiction. This “era of discussion”, as James titled it, stretched on into the new century as writers sought to reflect critically on their craft, both explicitly, for example, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces to his novels (1917) and E. M. Forster’s Cambridge lecture series collected as Aspects of the Novel (1927), and within literature itself, in novels like Howards End (1910) or G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). This paper recasts the literature of the decades before Modernism as distinctive in a critical self-consciousness which began shaping literary practice from the early 1880s, distinguishing it from Victorian literature and creating a mode of writing that could profitably be termed “Edwardian” rather than being absorbed into the ambiguous camp of “proto-Modernism”.
Andrew Glazzard (Royal United Services Institute) The Edwardian Lunar Eclipse.
The period from the mid-1890s to the First World War was one of exceptional innovation in British fiction. As reading fiction became Britain's main leisure pursuit for the first and last time, more novels and short stories were published and consumed than ever before, and this brought unprecedented opportunities for authors as well as far-reaching changes in the literary marketplace. New genres emerged; writers experimented with form as well as content; new narrative techniques and strategies were developed. And yet this period is strangely neglected by literary scholars. Sometimes it is overlooked entirely, as when the cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century is written as Victorians handing over to Modernists, with little or nothing in between. Even one of the leading scholarly journals of the period portrays the period as an age of transition, implying that what came after was somehow more impressive or more complete. As a result, most of the period's authors are shamefully neglected, bar a handful who, with the approval of cultural arbiters like F.R. Leavis and George Orwell, went on to appear on syllabuses, on which they were often described as early Modernists. The Modernists themselves appropriated those of the period's writers they found most congenial, such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster, leaving the rest to be labelled, pejoratively, as 'Edwardians'.
This paper will seek to challenge the conventional view of Edwardian fiction as merely transitional by examining some of the technical innovations that were achieved by canonical and non-canonical writers alike. The paper will focus on the techniques that Ford Madox Ford labelled as 'literary Impressionism' -- a way of narrating and describing experience that foregrounds the observer and the experience of perception -- and show that these were not confined to writers like Ford and his friends Conrad and James. As a case study, the paper will focus on Wells's The First Men in the Moon, a novel (serialised in the Strand Magazine during the Boer War) which sets itself the task of making the reader see and experience things and events which have never been seen or experienced. In so doing, Wells took to an extreme the techniques which he and his 'early Modernist' contemporaries pioneered: despite being usually classified as genre fiction, The First Men in the Moon can be seen as one of the early twentieth century's most challenging and groundbreaking fictions. Panel 3b | Locating Edwardian Culture
Harry Wood (Independent) Britain’s Peril: Invasion and the Edwardian Crisis.
The history of the British Isles has been heavily shaped by the fear of invasion. From the Romans to the Spanish Armada, and from Napoleon to Hitler, many of the key moments of Britain’s island story have revolved around invasions, both those that succeeded and those that were repelled. Successive generations have experienced anxieties, both rational and irrational, over the prospect of foreign troops landing on British beaches. In the modern period Britain’s relationship with the sea saw such fears grow exponentially. As an imperial power whose welfare increasingly depended on maintaining control of global shipping lanes, the threat of a foreign attack on the metropole began to exert a major influence on Britain’s foreign and defence policy. Such fears became particularly acute during the late-Victorian and Edwardian years. A series of high-profile invasion scares gripped Britain in the years approaching 1914, ranging from the anti-French channel tunnel panic of 1881 through to the height of the Anglo-German naval race in 1909. Despite a consistent chorus of scepticism from some politicians and strategic planners, the threat of invasion remained a key facet of Britain’s political climate throughout the pre-war period. For the historian Howard Moon, it was “nothing less than a national obsession”.
British invasion fears have often been approached in the longue durée, with periodic scares interpreted through the prism of a deep-rooted national invasion neurosis. Yet recurrent invasion panics in Britain have always taken on a degree of contemporary colour. This is especially true of the pre-1914 period. The rise of the German menace, for example, helped create an invasion scare specific to the Edwardian years. In turn, British invasion discourse in this period was suffuse with domestic political anxieties, such as the female suffrage campaign, the re-emergence of Irish home rule, and increasing trade union militancy. In exploring a broad range of these representations, this paper will argue that such invasion fears are indicative of a coherent and uniquely Edwardian cultural movement.
Panel 3b | Locating Edwardian Culture
Samuel Shaw (University of Birmingham) Destination Transition? The Edwardian as an Artistic Category
‘“Edwardian” is one of art-history’s unclaimed adjectives’, argued John Russell in 1964. When categorising art made in Britain c.1900-1914 scholars have tended to see it either as an adjunct to Victorianism or a nascent form of modernism; or to refer back to broader art-historical terms such as realism, symbolism, narrative painting and formalism. Fixation on events such as Roger Fry’s 1910 exhibition of Post-Impressionism art, and the formal aesthetics it promoted, have created a false boundary that continues to dominate discourse, despite repeated calls (from Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett, among others) to broaden our understanding of what constituted modern art in early twentieth-century Britain. The word that appears most often in relation to visual arts of the period is that of ‘transitional’, which suggests a process of anxious development rather than, as more recent texts have suggested, constructive synthesis. In response to this, ‘Edwardian’ has in the last few years been seriously considered as a potential, though still problematic, alternative categorising term, demanding as it does that culture of the 1900s is not simply seem in relation to what it came after and preceded, but as something with its own distinct qualities.
This paper will question the usefulness of the ‘Edwardian’ as a response to the ‘transitional’ tag, with particular reference to two artists who have sometimes fallen between the art-historical cracks, being neither ‘Victorian’ enough to feature in studies of nineteenth century art, or ‘modern’ enough to star in modernism narratives. These artists – Charles Holmes and William Rothenstein – are often cast as in-betweeners or fence-sitters: embryonic modernists who lacked the nerve to push their art, or criticism, into more ‘advanced’ forms. If Holmes and Rothenstein, as with contemporaries such as Walter Sickert, are hard to categorise, is not because they lacked clear-sightedness, but because the existing categories struggle to appreciate the particular combination of ideas that their works express. I will use a small group of examples to explore how works by these artists occupied a productive, but as yet unnamed, middle-ground between competing styles and ideals.
Panel 3c | Victorian-Modernists and Modernist-Victorians
Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University) ‘Make it Old’: The Modern Aesthetics of T. Sturge Moore.
‘Make it Old’ is not a phrase that poet, playwright, designer, artist and critic T. Sturge Moore ever used, but it may well characterize his aesthetics. In the common conception, Sturge Moore’s work stands outside of ‘Modernism’ so-called, not in the least because he continued to use traditional verse form and produced several complicated blank verse plays that are not in keeping with the style and economy of the period. His work is usually and denigratingly lumped together with late- nineteenth century aestheticism and symbolism (as if there was no innovation in that period!), although, with the exception of his first volume of poetry, all his work was published in the twentieth. His last collection, The Known Unknown and a dozen odd Poems appeared in 1939. Notably, Ezra Pound when berating the dismal state of literature and poetry in Britain in the first decades of the twentieth century, made an exception for Sturge Moore.
Sturge Moore was unequivocally ‘modern’ in a number of different ways (and this will be the main argument of my paper). As an artist he was schooled in the tradition of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, with symbolism and William Morris, as well as Blake and Flaubert, as a clear reference points; while aesthetically he ‘idealized’ ideal beauty , he did so with sufficient originality and experimented with form (though, yes, modest in comparison with, say, The Waste Land). This with a twofold result: his poetic style was deliberately difficult – and thus also a very deliberate departure from most nineteenth-century lyrical and dramatic poetry. His subject matter was deliberately classical, with the intention to revive and retell Greek and Hebrew (Biblical) myth. Sturge Moore was making it new by making it old.
That said, Sturge Moore is not simply a transitional figure wedged between late-nineteenth century symbolism and the avant-garde. Rather, he is a poet, artist and thinker ‘of his time’ who is part of a network of figures whose aesthetic interests and ideas overlap, connect and coalesce as much as they clash. The circles in which Sturge Moore moved include many of the ‘modernists’ for whom he was not just a minor figure. When Eliot invited him to contribute to the inaugural issues of The Criterion he did so (he wrote) out of ‘a great respect for your judgement and taste”, adding “and count it of the highest importance to secure your support’.
Thus my paper proposes a revisionist approach to ‘modernism’ that rejects any firm division between avant-garde writers who are ‘in’ against the mediocrity of poets holding on to a Victorian/symbolist aesthetic and who are therefore ‘out’. Literary history does not simply work in waves or movements; instead literary periods such as ‘modernism’ should be seen fluidly as open, evolving networks of artists and writers. Sturge Moore’s interaction with and even influence on ‘modernist’ writers supports such a notion very well.
Panel 3c | Victorian-Modernists and Modernist-Victorians
Tom Breckin (Leeds Trinity University) Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf: The Modern Victorian and the Victorian Modernist.
The popular perception of Virginia Woolf sees her as the archetype of Bloomsbury modernism; experimental and boundary breaking in terms of her lifestyle as well as her literature. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is similarly portrayed as the paradigmatic Victorian man of letters. First editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and twice widowed by the time of Woolf’s early adolescence, he frequently appears in Woolfian scholarship as epitomising the archaic nineteenth-century Establishment whose conventions Woolf so wished to tear down.
Yet an argument can be made that these perspectives are limiting and fail to capture a complete picture either of Woolf or Stephen. They overlook Woolf’s frequent allusions to her Victorian heritage and specifically to the works of her father, while also failing to recognise Stephen’s own progressive (and often anti-Establishment) attitude. In my paper I will discuss these points, with a focus on how much of Woolf’s Victorian influence is drawn from Stephen, to the extent that his ideas are not only referenced but adapted and used by Woolf in significant modernist works, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and her essay manifesto on modernist literature, ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921). Thus I will make the case that these intertextual links between Woolf’s and Stephen’s bodies of work demonstrate the degree to which the Victorian-modern divide is blurred, even in the most unlikely instances.
Adrian Tait (Independent) Anxieties of Influence: from Victorian to Modern in Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs. Lippincote’s.
Famously, Harold Bloom wrote of the anxiety of influence, but influence extends over generations in ways that confuse and confound periodization. The work of Elizabeth Taylor is a case in point. Born in 1912, her first novel was not published until 1945, yet it represents a conscious and simultaneous engagement with the high realism of the Victorians and the modernism of writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and in particular, Virginia Woolf. In At Mrs. Lippincote’s, for example, Taylor’s protagonist, Julia, is trying not only to beat back the ghosts of staid, Victorian conventionality, but contend with the demands of a more modern generation, whose ill-defined expectations somehow throw into question her own roles as wife and mother without ever supplying a viable alternative. As if to underline her own difficulty, Julia is both independent-minded (failing, as her husband ruefully remarks, in her fundamental duty to accept) and highly literate, constantly invoking famous writers and their work, from the Brontë sisters to Woolf herself. In turn, Taylor’s style uses indirect free speech to speak for an increasingly diverse cast of characters – a cast far more diverse than anything to be found in Woolf’s work – whist retaining the right to interject authorially, a combination of the modern (or Modernist) and the traditional that itself speaks of the anxiety of influence. In these and other ways, At Mrs. Lippincote’s is revealed as both homage to, but also a parody of To the Lighthouse, in which Taylor’s Julia (after Julia Stephen, perhaps?) is trying to negotiate her own path in a world that that has neither left behind the archetypal angel in the house that is Mrs. Ramsey, nor fully embraced the independent, unmarried Lily Briscoe. This is no less Taylor’s own, literary difficulty, as she struggled to negotiate Woolf’s problematic but still recent legacy. As Taylor reflected, the leisure that allowed Woolf to write was itself a product of Victorian affluence, and in no way related to Taylor’s own lived reality. Who, then, is truly modern?
Panel 3c | Victorian-Modernists and Modernist-Victorians
Charlotte Fiehn (University of Cambridge) ‘The Perception of Separateness’: The Problem of Categorizing Forms in the Writing of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
In her essay, ‘Notes on Form in Art’, George Eliot posits that: ‘to anyone but those who are under the dire necessity of using the word and cannot afford to wait for a meaning, it must be more fruitful to ask, what relations of things can be properly included under the word ‘Form’ as applied to artistic composition, than to decide without any such previous inquiry that a particular work is wanting in form, or to take it for granted that the works of any one period or people are the examples of all that is admissible in artistic form’.
My paper will address issues of narrative form in the novels of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, arguing that the conventional categorizations and representations of George Eliot and Virginia Woolf are prompted by misreading of the authors’ aesthetic and creative agendas.
Examining stylistic similarities identifiable in the works of these two writers, I will argue against the categorization of George Eliot as a Victorian, realist novelist. Demonstrating the inadequacy of Eliot’s outright association with her chronological context – the Victorian period – I will propose instead that she is both a proto-modernist and a feminist writer within this historical context, both because of how she wrote and what she wrote about, beginning with analysis of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story’ from The Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), and moving on to look at her most controversial works, Romola (1863), The Spanish Gypsy (1868), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
Day Two | April 10th
Panel 4a | Irish Women Writers
Kathryn Laing (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) Late Nineteenth-Century Irish Women Writers, London Literary Networks and the Spaces and Places of ‘Making it New’.
Described as a ‘quasi’ sphere in the late nineteenth century’ (Ruth Hoberman, 2002, p. 491) and ‘a kind of guildhall for women writing outside the home to congregate (Susan Bernstein, 2013, 151), the Reading Room of the British Museum was a crucial space in which aspiring women writers and poets of this period could meet and network. Writers such as Katharine Tynan and Hannah Lynch, Catholic Irish women setting out on their literary careers with limited prospects for publishing in Dublin, needed to establish networks and publishers in London; the cultural and networking capital associated with the Reading Room was key for these and other Irish women writers who came to London during this period.
Intersecting with and closely allied to literary networks and friendships forged in the Reading Room of the British Museum, London’s ‘little Bohemias’ (White, 2011, 245) of the fin-de- siècle, the plethora of literary and artistic salons which flourished in different parts of London from the 1870s on, offered further opportunities for Irish women writers. Ana Parejo Vadillo has highlighted the significance of this turn-of- the century salon and coterie culture, often presided over by women and flourishing in distinct areas of London. Kensington, for example, ‘was marked, noted, and named as a fashionable, authoritative, and feminine urban space’ and it facilitated connections ‘between consumer culture, the mass press and authority’ (Vadillo, 1999, 88, 90). A diverse array of Irish women writers - poets, dramatists, novelists, many having turned to journalism too - with differing aesthetic, political and religious affiliations were part of this coterie culture.
The aim of this paper is twofold: first to recover a cross-section of these now marginalized, forgotten or neglected Irish women writers who frequented and participated in these powerful often feminine spaces. Second, to consider some of the ways in which these writers with their differing allegiances and affiliations - aesthetes, suffragists, New Women, nationalists devoted to Home Rule and the Irish cultural renaissance - contributed to and were shaped by the transformative discourses they encountered at the fin de siècle.
Panel 4a | Irish Women Writers
Sinéad Mooney (De Montfort University, Leicester) Emily Lawless and Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Irish Imperial Gothic.
This paper considers the work of two fin-de-siècle Irish women writers, Emily Lawless and Katherine Cecil Thurston, whose careers trouble the Victorian/Modernist divide. The Victorian Lawless (1852- 1913), long critically aligned with the inheritors of the historical novel of Sir Walter Scott, appears to share with other 19thc historical novelists like Charles Kingsley a view of the Elizabethan period as setting the foundations of Victorian British political stability, imperial power, and military glory, even as her nationality forced her work to question the complacent metropolitan view that the era represented a straightforward conquest of backwardness by progress. This paper will focus on Maelcho (1895), her neglected novel of the seventeenth-century Desmond rebellion which was admired by the young WB Yeats, and which, unlike her better-knownWith Essex in Ireland (1890), subverts the standard Hentyesque trajectory of the imperial romance for a more dark and fragmentary vision, poised between the characteristic self-undermining poles of Lawless's work, which I will read in terms of the undermining of a Scottean reading of Irish history by Darwinism and Biblical criticism, and an emergent proto-modernist nihilism.
Born in Ireland, Katherine Cecil Thurston (1875-1911) published six best-selling novels and numerous short stories in the first decade of the twentieth century. A somewhat scandalous public figure, associated with cultural, national and sexual 'degeneracy' by the contemporary conservative press for the fluidity of personal and national identity and artistic practice her work proposes, Thurston was critically neglected for a century after her death, but has recently undergone something of a critical rehabilitation as an Irish New Woman novelist and early modernist. This paper will consider the way in which a focus on male neurasthenia and drug addiction conduct a form of muted imperial critique in her political thriller John Chilcote, MP (1904), in which an identical double replaces a drug-addicted politician at a moment of imperial crisis, suggesting a degeneration at the heart of the British government and the empire. As a transplanted Irishwoman from a republican background, Thurston was particularly sensitive to the issues raised by British imperial conquest and domination. Numerous contemporary reviews saw parallels between Chilcote and Charles Stewart Parnell at the height of his political success in the early 1890s, as they did with Lawless' defeated Irish chieftain Maelcho.
My paper will consider Lawless and Thurston's genre-troubling colonial thematics, and the ways in which these engage with an Irish form of imperial gothic and to modernism's complex engagement with the imperial. Bringing Maelcho and John Chilcote, MP together allows for a consideration of an Irish women's writing at the turn of the 20th century which is less interested in formal innovation than in other forms of engagements with modernity which might be read as plausibly modernist, and which, furthermore attempts to give full weight to Ann L. Ardis' argument that fin-de-siècle literature constitutes a 'a varied, highly unstable, and fiercely contested discursive territory’.
Gerardine Meaney (University College Dublin) A Social Network Analysis Approach to Irish Women’s Writing from Victorian to Modern.
‘A social network analysis approach to Irish women’s writing from Victorian to Modern’ Since the beginning of the twenty first century, computational approaches to the analysis of social networks in literary texts have been developing rapidly, experimenting with corpora of varying size and historical provenance, visualizing networks and proposing a variety of interpretative functions for SNA. Literature does not offer empirical evidence of actual social relations, but it does offer an extraordinarily rich insight into how society and community are imagined by writers and readers. The co-location and contiguity of characters in literary texts can yield highly illuminating maps of textual social networks and imagined community. The paper will draw on the work of the ‘Nation, Genre and Gender: A Comparative Social Network Analysis of Irish and English Fiction, 1800-1922’ project (supported by the Irish Research Council) which combines literary scholarship and digital social network analysis to investigate the social imaginary of the novel in the long nineteenth century. The project combines quantitative, computational approaches with critical and interpretative tools. This combination of close and distant reading has considerable potential for analysing historical trends across a broad range of texts and for identifying lesser known work which is relevant to current critical debates. Digital analysis in this model is not a substitute for reading: it is a way of identifying relevant texts among the multitude which are digitally available, but not necessarily adequately tagged for theme, genre or provenance. It is proving an invaluable tool in mapping forgotten or ignored Irish women’s writing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, disrupting both modernist and revivalist teleologies and suggesting gradual changes in narrative focus across a continuum of narrative practices. Our research to date has identified an incremental tendency towards more concentrated networks of characters in fiction from the 1880s onwards within the corpus of 51 novels annotated to date. This narrative concentration on a much smaller group of characters centred on a central protagonist or protagonists is not uniform, however, and the data indicates a complex relationship between the nationality of authors, narrative locations, gender and genre. The use of computational method offers a way of mapping the relationship between canonical, popular and obscure texts with significance potential for feminist recovery projects and for re-conceptualising literary history. This paper will outline overall features of social networks in Irish and English fiction in the corpus from Bleak House (1853) to The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), but will focus on a comparison of Katherine Cecil Thurston’s Max (1910) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Panel 4b | The Fin-de-Siècle
Zoe Chadwick (Newman University) Representations of the body in Fin-de-Siècle Victorian Gothic Literature.
Bodies take many shapes and forms throughout the literature of the long nineteenth century. I wish to focus on the fin de siècle, however, as the period in which Victorianism and Modernism collided with unforeseen force. Literary representations of the body in the literature of this period range from half-humans to demonised disabilities to the outright supernatural. I wish to use examples from Victorian Gothic literature to unpack the range of bodily forms in this period and to ask what these forms indicate about British society’s transition into modern life. In particular I would like to examine Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890) in comparison to R. L Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Whilst Stevenson’s text is well studied and placed in the critical field, Machen’s text is relatively under investigated. I will compare the literary representation of the ‘extreme’ bodies in these texts in order to understand what these literary bodies tell us about the transition from Victorian ‘norms’ to Modern anxieties.
Duncan Milne (Edinburgh Napier University) ‘The incomparable pomp of eve’: Robert Louis Stevenson and the Poetry of the Fin-de-Siècle.
Robert Louis Stevenson was a writer whose placement as definitively of the Victorian period was secured by E. M. Forster placing him in the ‘stuffy room’ of the ‘immediate past’. Stevenson had become emblematic of an outmoded age, fit to be included among the eminent Victorians against whom the Modernist establishment raged. Yet this placement overlooks an important dimension to Stevenson’s influence on the literature of the period which bridges the supposedly impassable divide between the Victorian and the Modern. This paper will consider Stevenson’s poetry and its complex influence on the literary movements of the fin-de- siècle, while investigating what insights this influence offers into the tensions surrounding the emergence of new poetic styles in the late nineteenth century.
The reputation of Robert Louis Stevenson as a poet has always been eclipsed by his achievement in prose. In an influential critical study, Frank Swinnerton remarks that for all the merits of ‘clarity’ in his verse, Stevenson was ‘never within measurable distance of being a poet’. This is an assessment which has largely been shared by criticism in the century since, where such work has deigned to notice Stevenson’s poetry at all. This lack of critical attention has led to the network of associations which Stevenson’s poetry contributed to and engaged with being overlooked. This neglect has meant that the (at first flush, unlikely) influence of Stevenson on the French avant-garde has never been fully recognised, despite the many enthusiastic essays by the poet Marcel Schwob praising the Scottish writer’s influence on Symbolism.
Alongside this influence, the paper will consider the paradox of how Stevenson’s poetry was cited as a source which informed both the Decadent and the Counter-Decadence movements. In considering this, the paper will also question problem of the effect of literary and social networks on contemporary interpretation: Stevenson had close relationships with a number of the writers of the influential Decadent journal The Yellow Book, as well as a tempestuous friendship with W. E. Henley, the figurehead of the Counter Decadence. How far did these relationships influence perceptions of Stevenson’s poetry, and can our own interpretations of literature ever be extricated from the personalities who produce them, and from the arbitrary distinctions and categorisations of period?
Panel 4b | The Fin-de-Siècle
Juan Araujo (Universidad Buenos Aires) Parody, Paganism and the Inconvenient Homoerotic Desire in Saki´s Gabriel-Ernest.
One of the most heavily eroticized figure in Saki´s works appear in Gabriel-Ernest, the story of a boy warewolf whose sexual taste is too shocking and almost unbearable for the others characters. The eroticism in this short story focuses in a savage and pagan boy who puts out of order the heteronormative conventions and the Victorian masculine morality. This paper will highlight certain details of Hector Munro´s family privacy, his travels, his Victorian education and his encounter with the poet John Addington Symonds that will allow us to chart the early influences and his first homoerotic encounter. Later, the importance of Paganism and the relationship with sexual desire for the Edwardians authors will be discussed. Saki through his wit and sardonic humour has been a scathing critic of the social and aesthetics tendencies of his time; he was an author affiliated with the legacy of Oscar Wilde. Simon Stern declares that “his whole literary career may be seen as an extrapolation of Wilde´s principles”. Finally, it will be examined how Saki particularly parodies these homoerotic desires in Gabriel-Ernest. One of the aim for which parody has proven to be especially well suited is the undermining of normative sexual idealizations by oppressed groups and individuals trying to discuss their positions with society. The homosexual culture is highly dependent on artifice, image and parody for its strategies and also to validate the essence of the homoerotic desire. So critics and parodists of decadence and aestheticism fiction like Saki, played an important role in solidifying the double-coded discourse that conveyed unconventional sexual inclinations trough the pagan boy aesthete’s speech and actions. Edwardian´s parodic literature was undoubtedly indebted to nineteenth-century aestheticism.
A large list of Pan's writers appeared in Britain between 1890 and 1918. The growth of cities like London, the fast spread of middle-class suburbs, the decay of the countryside economics and the struggle against Christian morality were a shocking reality to both fin-de-siècle and Edwardians authors.
Pan is also synonym of uncontrollable sexual passion. Dismissing rational and "healthy" discourse is a way of establishing a counter-discourse that can connect a genuine experience. Ironically, Edwardians were enthusiasts with their own health: Hot bath, tennis, "mind cures" and "rest cures" were the promising therapies of the period. The distinctive twist that Saki undertakes in this story is manifested by an invocation of certain aesthetics values related to the fin-de-siècle through a destabilizing shadow that poses on, plays with, and defies all these traces: Parody. According to Patricia Merivale, both tales Gabriel-Ernest and The Music on the Hill have on their surface two parodied objects: The werewolf and the Pan horror tales. Saki re-means that Pagan figure that the fin-de-siècle and its Edwardians predecessors erected to their own measure, he parodies that aesthetics influence to show it later as a failure.
Panel 5a | Poetry and Form
Benedict Jones-Williams (University of Edinburgh) Influence or Anxiety? Examining Canon Formation at Work in 20th-Century Poetry Anthologies.
The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, and first published in October 1900, saw its editor (as he explains to the reader in his preface to the volume) attempt to ‘range over the whole field of English verse from the beginning, or from the Thirteenth Century to this closing year of the Nineteenth, and to choose the best.’ There are three claims worth investigating in this statement of editorial intent: firstly, that ‘the Thirteenth Century’ marked a definitive ‘beginning’ for poetry in English, secondly, Quiller- Couch’s positioning of 1900 as the ‘closing year of the Nineteenth [century]’ rather than the beginning of the Twentieth rings a decidedly backwards-looking note which is troubling for those of us who consider modernity, in both literature and other areas of cultural practice, to have been well underway by this point in time, and thirdly, the notion that it is possible for the compiler of such a collection to ‘choose the best.’ By what criteria have the poems included therein been judged? Who is left out? And, most pertinently for the paper I wish to present, how do the selected authors fit together within the pages of the anthology itself?
Underpinning all of these statements is an unspoken sense of a continuous poetic tradition, traceable from the medieval period down to the late-Victorian. Would it be possible to argue for such a tradition in the present day? Quiller-Couch’s confidence in both his selections and his authority to have chosen thus is echoed in the material form of the book itself: a small, yet serious- looking volume, bound in dark blue leatherette with gilt edging and lettering, The Oxford Book of English Verse seems to invite itself onto one’s shelf without the need for further questioning. By 1904 it had gone through nine separate printings. Thanks to Quiller-Couch, the poetic anthology was possessed of a critical weight of its own, and fast became a popular way for poetry to reach a wide and varied audience.
In the paper I wish to present at ‘Transitions’, I will look at several anthologies of poetry from the early to mid-20th century, analysing the ways in which they frame the authors included, in some instances yoking together authors whose work seems dissimilar yet remain somehow related to each other through, and across, the pages of these collections. By paying close attention to editor’s prefaces as well as the bibliographical presentation of these texts, I hope to make clear the potentiality for anthologies to act as textual agents in the formation of the literary canon. These are texts which rely on the presentation of the subjective judgments of their compilers as seemingly objective for their success in persuading readers of the rightness of their selections, a process which I believe has real bearing on our present-day understanding of the relationships between writers of the 19 th and 20 th centuries.
Panel 5a | Poetry and Form
Catherine Charlwood (University of Warwick) Metrical Expectations: Thomas Hardy’s Non-Modernist Modern Metres.
Thomas Hardy is a canonical figure whose work registers the socio-cultural changes which occurred with the move from Victorian to modern: Hardy’s poems remember a present which was quickly becoming the past. While Hardy may be more readily remembered as an English novelist, he lived and wrote through the turn of the century. Poetically, too, he spanned a significant range: though Hardy hob-nobbed with the high Victorian Robert Browning, he was published by literary Impressionist Ford Madox Ford.
Seen against the advent of vers libre, Hardy appears to be a purveyor of traditional metrics, but this obscures his own experiments with poetic form (such as the changed final stanza of ‘The Voice’). Hardy’s interest was in how metre relates to expectation for the reader. Hardy underlined ‘expectancy’ in the phrase ‘greater expectancy of the rhythm’ from Robert Bridges’s influential essay ‘Humdrum and Harum-Scarum: A Lecture on Free Verse’ (1922): Hardy found himself in agreement with many of the Poet Laureate’s conclusions. Writing to Amy Lowell, Hardy complained, of free verse, that ‘there is no expectation raised of a response in sound or beat, and the pleasure of its gratification, as in regular poetry’.
This paper recasts the so-called prosody wars of the Edwardian period as s spectrum of expectation, with the carefully measured Georgian anthologies at one end, and modernist free verse experiments at the other. Thomas Hardy sits somewhere between the two, an experienced Victorian innovating poetic form by responding to a range of developing ideas regarding metre.
I am less concerned with the stand-off between free verse and traditional metrics than how this disagreement is couched in terms of expectation. Behind this paradigmatic moment in poetic history stands the question of how expectation is at work in poetry, and how much expectation is too much. Ford Madox Ford, at least, found metrical poetry to have ‘endless monotonous, polysyllabic, unchanging rhythms’ (in his ‘Notes for a Lecture on Vers Libre). In foregrounding Hardy’s views and work, this paper demonstrates the importance of expectation to poetry of the period, as well as charting a progression from the Victorian to the Modern era.
Panel 5a | Poetry and Form
Jack Quin (Trinity College Dublin) W.B. Yeats, AE and Revivalist Sculpture Writing
This paper constructs an unfamiliar portrait of W.B. Yeats as a poet who was educated and invested in the art of sculpture in Victorian Ireland. It outlines how his Dublin art school training in the 1880s put him in contact with John Hughes and Oliver Sheppard who would become two of the foremost Irish sculptors of the early twentieth century. Following their overlapping careers and interests I will consider the collaborative and interdisciplinary aesthetic of the Celtic Revival as a point of intersection between statuary and poetry; between Victorian and Modernist aesthetics.
The art writing of George Russell (another art school kid) and Yeats from the 1890s to early 1900s, which promoted the contemporary statues of Sheppard and Hughes, will be examined in order to propose an alternative historiography of modern Irish sculpture, one that is aligned more directly to Irish poetry of the time. In the second section, I suggest that Russell and Yeats renegotiate Matthew Arnold’s 1867 critique of the plastic arts of the Celt. The multiple representations and adaptations of Celtic mythic figures – Oisin, Niamh and Cuchulain – in verse and sculpture during Yeats and Russell’s lives will be documented in order to understand the poets’ early treatment of statuary as a creative resource for reviving myth. At the same time this paper proposes that Victorian art training and the New Sculpture Movement informed Yeats and Russell’s ‘mythic mode’ and later modernist experimentations in poetry. Towards the end of his life, in ‘The Statues’ and The Death of Cuchulain, Yeats would return to the sculpture of Sheppard and an Arnoldian ‘sense of measure’ to stave off the ‘filthy modern tide’.
By utilising visual artists’ archives to enrich our understanding of modernist literary studies, and applying art historical theory to a poet’s ekphrastic or panaesthetic oeuvre, we can better understand the extent to which modernist writers were collaborative and ‘interdisciplinary’ avant la lettre. As Rachel Teukolsky contends in The Literate Eye (2009), nineteenth century ‘art writing’ was anticipatory and constitutive of the changes in modernist aesthetics. 1 By the same token, Celtic Revivalist art criticism informs twentieth-century sculptural aesthetics and modernist poetics.
Panel 5b | The ‘New’ Woman?
Fran Bigman (University of Kent) ‘She might be intelligent’: Thinking in the Feminist Bildungsroman
In a pivotal scene, Rachel Vinrace, the protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), exclaims “I know nothing!” The coming-of-age story the novel tells is a gendered story of intellectual development. What does it mean to think, as a woman, and to think as a woman? Rita Felski has maintained that such novels should be considered as feminist Bildungsroman and, as such, pose challenges both to patriarchal structures and to the Bildungsroman itself as a genre; she argues for “the historical process of women coming to consciousness of female identity as a potentially oppositional force to existing social and cultural values.” This paper will explore the oppositional cultural work of the feminist Bildungsroman by examining a specific kind of Bildungsroman: stories of female intellectual development such as The Voyage Out and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883).
These novels were written at a time when the nature of intelligence was increasingly debated in the UK. Francis Galton, in developing his theories of eugenics, argued that intelligence was hereditary, fixed, and measurable, starting a vogue for intelligence tests. Commentators discussed whether women’s intelligence was inferior to that of men. This paper will contextualize the feminist intellectual Bildungsroman of The Voyage Out and The Story of an African Farm with reference to this discussion as it played out in novels of the time, including those of George Gissing, who had mixed opinions on female intelligence, as The Odd Women (1893) would suggest, and in the popular press, including the Atlantic Monthly, which featured the feminist Walter George’s article “Notes on the Intelligence of Woman” (1915), and the Englishwoman (from 1909) and the Freewoman (from 1911), feminist versions of intellectual magazines as the Nineteenth Century and Contemporary Review—the Freewoman was billed as a ‘thinking organ’.
How do depictions of women’s intelligence in Woolf’s and Schreiner’s novel challenge what Rita Felski has identified as a binary between so-called masculine high modernism and feminized mass culture, and between Victorianism and modernism? Felski also has argued for an expansion of the Bildungsroman to include novels about women developing an identity that places them in opposition to the status quo, as well as modernist novels that involve sudden bursts of self- formation, expressed experimentally, rather than the classic realist novel of gradual development. How can looking at discussions of women’s intelligence across various fields—literature, history, psychology, education—and in a wide range of periodicals further expand the notion of what counts as Bildungsroman, and how would works included in an expanded version of the genre suggest alternate models of intelligence?
Panel 5b | The ‘New’ Woman?
Sarita O. Mizin (Lehigh University) Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s Transcreation of the New Woman for Modern Times.
This paper analyzes two examples of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s translation work in her volume, Motichur Vol. II (1922) through a historical understanding of an emergent women’s literary international at the fin de siècle. I look specifically at her creative translation of excerpts from Maria Corelli’s The Murder of Delicia (1896), a “New Women” novel about an independent and literary woman, and fantasy writer F.W. Bain’s The Digit of the Moon (1898), a mock-translation of the story of women’s creation from an imaginary Sanskrit text. By analyzing these excerpts together and reading them alongside the original versions of the English texts, I argue that they illustrate a nuanced analysis of the transnational cultural and textual origins of women’s oppression on a global scale. By inserting her own exegesis and alterations to the texts in Bengali, Rokeya’s translations placed her own words in direct conversation with literary genres in English which she saw as challenging and/or reinforcing transcultural practices that were responsible for women’s status in the world. Using these examples to demonstrate the range of her archive, they support my argument that her writing provided critical examples of internationally inflected reading material through which literate Bengali and/or English-speaking readers could come to revise and reflect on the knowledge produced by textual traditions across languages and nations.
Approaching Rokeya’s writing through her translation practice builds upon previous scholarship in South Asian and Imperial studies which was committed to understanding her as a writer that was “indigenous. . . without foreign influence” (See vii, Roushan Jahan, ed. And trans. 1988 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Sultana’s Dream, A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The Secluded Ones. New York: The Feminist Press). In recovering a more complex understanding of Rokeya’s literary legacy that does not view her nationalism as antithetical to internationalist thinking, this paper ends by presenting Rokeya’s literary archive as a definitive case study in the textual practices of fin de siècle women’s literary internationalism. With a literary life bridging the centuries, her translation practice in these two examples brings what she saw as both the best and worst of Victorian-era thinking on “the women question” and re-writes them for a new century that had stubbornly remained too much the same as the last in its treatment of women.
Panel 5b | The ‘New’ Woman?
Anne Reus (Leeds Trinity) ‘A most … moving piece of work’: Margaret Oliphant in Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas.
In this paper, I intend to challenge Virginia Woolf’s famous declaration that ‘On or around December 1910, human character changed’. Drawing on Woolf’s vast body of journalism, I will show that the radical modernism of her fiction coexists with the essays’ consistent dialogue with the Victorian period. This lingering influence is particularly evident in Woolf’s writing on Victorian women writers: combining biography with literary criticism, they highlight that Woolf revisits, revises and perpetuates Victorian ideas about femininity, professional authorship and women’s lives.
By examining a range of case studies, I will show that Woolf’s responses to Victorian ideology are varied: Woolf revises a Victorian Jane Austen into a proto-modernist predecessor, advocates for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s reinsertion into a modern canon of women’s writing, but is not able to see beyond a Victorian obsession with Charlotte Brontë’s unfeminine anger. In their liberal and frequent use of Victorian biography and criticism, Woolf’s essays on Victorian women writers therefore demonstrate that Steve Ellis’ claim for a post-Victorian Virginia Woolf can easily be extended to her non-fiction, and contribute to a more nuanced view of Woolf’s positioning as a writer who was a leading Modernist, but never forgot her Victorian roots.
Panel 5c | The City
Zeynep Harputlu (Siirt University) Ruins, Liminality and Identity in Morrison’s Fiction.
This article probes the extent to which spatial segregation, social-class stratification, and liminal spaces and bodies played a role in the survival of the East End in the late-nineteenth century. Morrison’s fiction, in this sense, builds awareness of neglect and degeneration, and highlights the need for renewal and restoration in the East End. Morrison’s style is distinctive for telling the story of East Enders from an insider’s point of view and translating ‘the stranger’s literature’ into a more intimate and personal experience. Undertaking the city as a “modern” -unified yet heterogeneous- fabric, this study suggests that slums and ruinous spaces were a part of a greater whole and their potential for liminality was essential to the existence of the East End. It takes a thematic approach to the representation of the East End and focuses on ruins, holes, analogies of animals, indefinable objects and grotesque bodies in A Child of the Jago (1896) -with a greater focus-, Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and The Hole in the Wall (1903). Morrison writes about the ruinous selves and sites with a great emphasis on the brutal nature and degrading effects of slums in ACJ. The Jago is not only a place to dwell in but it also nourishes and hides criminals within its ruins and holes. It is an urban ruin that aggravates the efforts of the middle classes trying to re- construct an ordered and transparent space. Subterranean spaces, ruins, and holes generate new paths for the fugitives who know this place well. However, the demolishment of the Jago affects the dwellers negatively as they lose their sense of security and their relation to this place alters greatly. In THW, the unrecognisable body of Viney is found in the ruins. The ruin functions as a space covering both dead bodies and mysterious crimes in the novel. His decayed and unrecognisable body is objectified; it turns into ‘a thing’ and becomes an integral part of the ruined spaces in the East End. Moreover, in A Child of the Jago, the reader finds a significant number of analogies of animals, indefinable objects and spaces, such as rats, human forms and holes, repeated throughout the novel. These are partly a representation of the primal fear of the loss of distinction between object and subject, animal and human, and the dangerous quality of ambiguity. The deviation and grotesqueness of the Jago, on the other hand, help maintain its existence and survival disregarding the social codes and practices of the other classes. The Jagos pose threat to the security of other social classes even after the demolition of the Jago houses, which suggests a strong connection between the dwelling place and its inhabitants, as well as an unpredictable power of liminal spaces and identities. Their spatial segregation within the city and the normalisation of their own codes and criminal acts enhance their ability to overcome difficulties. Their identities are strictly shaped by and tied to these particular streets or ‘micro- localities’, as Morrison ‘ascribed East End brutality in the Old Nichol to its poverty- induced isolation’.
Panel 5c | The City
David Barnes (University of Oxford) ‘Beastly Flâneurs: Animal Street Haunting from the Fin de Siècle to the Age of Modernism.
In H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), the book’s narrator Edward Pendrick returns to Britain after spending almost a year trapped on a tropical island where horrific experiments have created a community of animal-human hybrids. Yet Pendrick’s return to London gives him no respite from his beastly visions. ‘When I lived in London,’ he relates, ‘the horror was well-nigh insupportable’. ‘I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glanced jealously at me, weary pale workers go coughing by me, with tired eyes and eager paces like wounded deer dripping blood […]’. In short, what Pendrick calls the ‘confusion of cities and multitudes’ seems to confront him again with the disturbing animality of human figures.
Walter Benjamin’s famous reading of Baudelaire critiques the French poet for conflating two figures that Benjamin sees as distinct: the ‘man of the crowd’, named for the 1840 Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, and the flâneur. For Benjamin, the flâneur ‘moves among the [street] crowd’ with ‘skill and ease’, observing and enjoying the urban spectacle. Baudelaire’s figuration of the city crowd, by contrast, inherits from Poe a sense of its ‘menacing’ essence. For Baudelaire, writes Benjamin, ‘big-city crowds’ were ‘essentially inhuman’. In this paper, I take Benjamin’s ‘inhuman’ conception of the Baudelairian crowd as a starting point to interrogate the non-human presences that move through the city streets of late Victorian and modernist texts. Like the flâneur, they may move at ‘ease’ through the city. Yet they also trouble notions of civilisation and urban culture, confronting their human observers with the dehumanising alienation embodied by the modern metropolis in this period of its most rapid expansion. In fin-de-siècle texts by Wells, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson, London is construed as fundamentally animal, as human-animal hybrids like Pendrick’s ‘beast folk’, the zoomorphic Count Dracula, and the ‘monkey’-like Hyde in Stevenson’s 1886 novel haunt the city’s streets. In the final part of the paper, I focus on a modernist text, Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933). An exploration of life through the eyes of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet spaniel, Flush offers an opportunity for Woolf to explore urban sensations through the consciousness of a nonhuman. The text allows Woolf to address issues like urban poverty, social class, and crime at a distance; Flush’s canine experiences provide a strikingly different way of experiencing urban pleasures and problems. In all these texts, I argue, the animal presents the opportunity to chart the expanding cultural reach of the city in, firstly, the late-Victorian, and then the modernist ‘moment’. In particular, I explore the ramifications of this expansion for cultural understandings of (human) mental health.
Panel 6a | Aestheticism
Kimberley Clarke (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Transitioning Anarchy: Aestheticism, Art and Anarchy in The Man Who Was Thursday.
This paper explores the transition from Victorian to Modernist literature using G.K Chesterton’s critique of emerging literary modernism in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Chesterton is of particular interest when exploring the movement from Victorian to Modernist literary culture. For many commentators, he represents the strict moralistic image of Victorianism and as a self- proclaimed lover of Dickens and a devout Christian, his work is often seen as a reaction against modernity rather than part of modernism itself. This paper argues for a more complex approach, showing Chesterton’s novel as revealing a change in the relationship between anarchy and literature at the time of his writing. Rather than simply responding to modernism with the reactionary Victorian values of the past, as critics have often assumed, Chesterton offers a critique of modernism that reveals the nature of the relationship between anarchism and revolution in the early 20th century.
In a seminal text on anarchy and modernism, David Weir asserts that ‘anarchism moved into the culture of modernism when it ceased to have political validity’. Essentially, his argument is that after anarchism lost its political power or because of that fact, it took up a place in the literary and artistic world of modernism. Contrary to this narrative, I argue that the process by which anarchism transitions from the political sphere to the literary and artistic world is sometimes designed precisely to remove the political threat posed by anarchism and belittle it by claiming that it is purely literary. Chesterton himself uses this technique to dismiss anarchism in The Man Who Was Thursday, though the novel exceeds its author’s intentions to reveal this process.
Further, the argument made by Weir relies on a clear distinction between literature and politics, which the novel – perhaps unintentionally - does not sustain. A key text for my argument here is Deaglán Ó Donghail’s Blasted Literature. Ó Donghail argues that The Man Who Was Thursday presents the ‘destructive-creative dynamic associated with anarchist ‘political thought’ as a thoroughly aesthetic matter and reads its revolutionary character both as a symptom of political modernity and as a generator of literary modernism’. This paper also discusses dynamite and explosives as an important feature of modernist anarchy, showing that dynamite is both political and literary. As the novel itself says, ‘Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best symbol.’ The theme of dynamite complicates the apparent divide between literature and politics, undermining Chesterton’s own attempt to dismiss anarchism as purely bourgeois literary nonsense.
Without being anything like a defense of Chesterton’s dangerous conservatism and religious dogmatism, this paper explores Chesterton’s often radical critique of an emerging literary modernism and its absorption of anarchist aesthetics. The Man Who Was Thursday criticizes the Decedent movement of ‘arts for art’s sake’ and reads the modernist rejection of order and structure as ‘revolt for revolt’s sake’. The novels accusation that the modern poet is merely continues in this tradition of Aestheticism is an attempt to dismiss and reject the genuine threat of anarchism (both political and literary) in the era of emerging modernism, but Chesterton’s novel has a radical edge in making this visible to us. Perhaps this odd radical underside to Chesterton’s writing explains why he has been found attractive by such radical thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek.
Panel 6a | Aestheticism
Julie Taylor (Northumbria University) Ronald Firbank’s Lively Things: Agency, Animation and Modernist Aestheticism.
‘To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer’, wrote Carl Van Vechten about the British writer Ronald Firbank. However, as Van Vechten realised, Firbank was not simply a fin-de- siècle aesthete stuck in the wrong century: he was also a modernist – an ‘Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce’ or ‘A Rebours à la mode.’ This paper considers the intimate relationship between Firbank’s innovative and experimental modernist style and his literary and cultural attachments to nineteenth-century aestheticism.
The paper focuses in particular on Vainglory (1915), Firbank’s first (and longest) novel and the work identified by critics as heralding a distinctively ‘Firbankian’ style. I consider the author’s recognisably aesthetic concern for objects; an emphasis on the liveliness of things which is often accompanied by an equal emphasis on the thingliness of persons. Through its central ‘plot,’ Mrs Shamefoot’s longing for ‘vitrification’ as a quasi- saint in St. Dorothy’s Cathedral in the fictional English town of Ashringford, Firbank both pastiches the aestheticist desire to become an art object and sets in motion a broader inquiry into the nature of in/human agency and the bounds of the subject/object. The novel’s examination of the animating properties of light and electricity not only engages with familiar aestheticist arguments about nature vs. artifice, but produces a series of questions about the vitality and agency of matter and non-human actants. Vainglory offers a variety of discourses through which we might consider such questions: Roman Catholicism and natural science merge with more specifically late-nineteenth- century preoccupations, such as spiritualism and the study of ancient Egyptian culture. To this my paper adds the discourse of twenty- first-century theory, as I draw on the language of various neo-materialist and object-oriented accounts of ontology to conceptualise Firbank’s remarkable confusions between human and non-human bodies. Furthermore, while Firbank’s particular focus on inhuman agency might stem largely from his late- nineteenth- century attachments, it leads to his most innovative and ‘modern’ narrative strategies. These strategies include his trademark employments of dialogue and free indirect discourse and his ongoing attempts to use gossip as a structural model for his narratives. Firbank’s experimental style captures his interest in weak intentionality, diffused, desubjectivised agency, and impersonal desire and affect. In Firbank’s critically neglected work, I suggest, we might find compelling links between nineteenth-century aestheticism and some of modernism’s signature textual tropes.
Panel 6a | Aestheticism
Sasha Dovzhyk (Birkbeck) The ‘Beardsley Man’ in Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity.
In his nostalgic record of the Victorian Decadence, Holbrook Jackson argued that Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘singularity ma[de] him a prisoner for ever in those Eighteen Nineties of which he had been so inevitable an expression’. Although interest in the artist has never been lacking, Beardsley’s scholars have mostly concentrated on how he ‘expressed’ the paradoxes of the English ‘yellow nineties’. Instead, I suggest shifting our attention to how Beardsley’s work and myth were consumed in a different cultural milieu, particularly, in the early-twentieth- century Russia.
In that dramatic Russian afterlife, Beardsley was proclaimed a ‘master’ by the Ballets Russes designers, a ‘genius’ by Symbolist poets, and ‘the first Futurist in graphic arts’ by the emerging avant- garde. While the so-called ‘Beardsleyism’ permeated modernist writing and life practices, the ‘Beardsleyesque’ was constructed as a quality which could be discovered in people and things. Thanks to the multiple visual and verbal depictions of Beardsley made available through modernist periodicals Mir iskusstva and Vesy, a peculiar form of male (self- )representation emerged in the homophile art circles of St Petersburg and Moscow. Building on case studies of men who were compared to Beardsley (modernist litterateurs Iurii Iurkun and Georgii Ivanov), or used Beardsley as a model for self-fashioning (symbolist artist Nikolai Feofilaktov), this paper will explore various aspects of this new type of urban Russian masculinity, from fashion and body image to a thoroughly modern understanding of sexuality.
Panel 6b | Religion and Spirituality
Katherine Mullin (University of Leeds) ‘Why I left the Church of Rome’: Victorian confessional obscenity in the fiction of James Joyce.
In April 1868, the first legal definition of obscenity was provoked by the case of The Confessional Unmasked, a sensational and disingenuous tract purporting to expose the corruptions of the Roman Catholic faith. The tract, in circulation in tens of thousands across the country, had caused bitter sectarian rioting across the Midlands. It prompted a reluctant Victorian judiciary into offering a tardy working definition of what should be prohibited under the notoriously vague 1857 Obscene Publication Act. The Hicklin test, as the 1868 judgement became known, proved formative for modernism, since it established through case law that material tending ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’ was obscene, irrespective of noble intentions or, by extension, literary merit. James Joyce was one of the most prominent casualties of the Hicklin test, which informed obscenity statutes in Britain, Ireland and the United States.
This paper will cast new light on Joyce’s fraught battles with censorship, through exploring his creative responses to the Hicklin test in his fiction. Specifically, it will challenge the Victorian- modernist divide, often so conspicuous in accounts of obscenity and art, by demonstrating Joyce’s intimate engagement with the history of obscenity legislation. Joyce’s work is saturated with references to the popular mid-Victorian vogue for confessional erotica, of which The Confessional Unmasked was the most infamous example. These references, I shall argue, form a confession in themselves. Most obviously, they betray Joyce’s prescient awareness of the transgressions of his own writing, and the likely consequences of publication. But, most intriguingly, they demonstrate his subtle understanding of the nuances of Victorian legal history. Joyce’s many allusions to confessional erotica look back to an ebullient mid-Victorian tradition of rambunctious bawdy, which scarcely fits the modernist caricature of their haughty, strict, moralising forebears. They suggest his understanding that censorship was scarcely Victorian at all—but instead a phenomenon of the more prudish twentieth century.
Jane de Gay (Leeds Trinity University) ‘A streak of the puritan’?: Virginia Woolf and the Protestant Work Ethic.
Although Virginia Woolf was the daughter of two Victorian agnostics and although she herself famously wrote in her late memoir ‘A Sketch of the Past’, that ‘certainly and emphatically there is no God’, her wider family had a rich religious heritage. Woolf was descended from two prominent Evangelical families – the Venns and the Stephens – who had been central to the Clapham Sect. Woolf hinted at their influence in the same memoir, when discussing her shame of mirrors, dress and appearance: ‘I am almost inclined to think that I inherited a streak of the puritan, of the Clapham Sect.’ Woolf certainly inherited many of her ancestors’ books and their influence continued into her own generation with her two cousins, Dorothea and Rosamond Stephen, who tried to convert Woolf and her siblings.
As this paper demonstrates, Woolf persistently interrogated the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic in her work. The paper will start by drawing on the work of Max Weber to demonstrate how this ethic continued to be influential in the modernist era. It will then consider examples from a selection of Woolf’s essays – ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, ‘On Being Ill’, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas – in order to examine how Woolf appropriated and adapted key ideas from Evangelical thinking. It shows how she used these to defend the importance of literature as a vocation and to defend women’s spiritual freedom and professional dignity. Panel 6b | Religion and Spirituality
Georgia Walton (University of Leeds) Reading Proust, Reading Emerson: Interpretive Labour in A la Recherché du Temps Perdu.
In recent years theories of reading have garnered especial prominence. This paper draws parallels between the models of reading found across the work of nineteenth century American writer and founder of the Transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and those in Marcel Proust’s A la Recherché du Temps Perdu (1913–1927). Though critics have previously seen Proust as a reader of Emerson, the latter has frequently been written off as an early, overly moralistic, influence whom Proust shirks in his mature work. This interpretation is typical of reductive attitudes towards nineteenth century writing that stem from the periodisation of the Victorian and Modernist eras; the influence of the nineteenth century writer is regularly seen as a naïve element of early work that must be overcome in order for the twentieth century writer to complete their truly Modernist magnum opus. Equally, American philosophy is often seen as disconnected from European philosophical and theoretical thought. My paper will contest these critical approaches and will instead, taking Paul de Man’s work on the Recherché as its starting point, suggest that the rigorous interpretive labour that de Man and Proust both demand of readers of the Recherché, is concurrent with the idea of ‘creative reading’ that Emerson posits in his address ‘The American Scholar’ (1837). In ‘The American Scholar’ Emerson insists that reading should be an active and engaged occupation, a view echoed in nineteenth century British realism. I maintain then, that a combined reading of Emerson and Proust, finds an approach to reading and language that refutes both traditional periodisation and assumptions about transatlantic philosophical and theoretical traditions.
This paper will aim to expose a confluence between word and world that is found in both nineteenth and twentieth century transatlantic understandings of language. I argue that the Transcendentalist view that spirituality is experienced through the natural world bears striking resemblance to the instances of ‘involuntary memory’ in the Recherché; both Emerson and Proust suggest that some form of spirituality or transcendent experience is accessed through sensory experience. Both Proust and Emerson see language as a process of matching the sensory with the transcendent, which necessitates constant interpretation and engagement with its signs on the part of the reader, to discover a ‘truth’ within it. Both writers require of their readers an attention and sensitivity to the effusive significations of language and they both render reading as a perpetual process of epiphany that attempts to discover a unity between language and world but ultimately finds that this unity is always in a precarious state. By reading Proust’s Recherché in the light of Emerson’s essays, I will show that nineteenth century writers did not, as is often assumed, take the materiality and ‘truth’ of language for granted. Equally, I will suggest that the labour of composition and interpretation of literary texts imported in the nineteenth century in both America and Europe, was carried forwards into the early twentieth century.
Panel 6c | Close Encounters: Intimacy and Relationships
Hannah Comer (University of Birmingham) ‘My Chief of Men’: W.B. Yeats, May Morris and the Legacy of William Morris.
William Morris was one of the most influential and best-known figures of the nineteenth century, not just as a designer and writer, but also as an artist, businessman, passionate social and political reformer, environmentalist and preservationist. Morris was an important figure to W. B. Yeats, not only through Yeats’s personal relationship with Morris during the late nineteenth century and his early influence on Yeats, but also as a lasting and profound influence on Yeats throughout his life and career. Yeats wrote of Morris that ‘I owe to him many truths’ and would later admit that Morris ‘gives me all the best stories.’ Yeats’s engagement with Morris’s prolific amount of work is reflected throughout Yeats’s own prolific body of work, including critical, political and literary works. May Morris was a significant figure of the Arts and Crafts movement, specialising in embroidery at her father’s firm Morris & Co and designed jewellery, wallpaper and costume. She also wrote, taught and lectured on the Arts and Crafts and founded the Women’s Guild of Arts. Critics often note her being overshadowed by her father, but she is now being considered in her own right, as evidenced in the current exhibition of her work at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. This is the first time that any exhibition has been solely dedicated to her life and work. She was, however, instrumental in building a legacy for Morris and her own work supports her father’s and was shaped by his ideas of crafts and socialism, especially in seeking a revival of the crafts that he had promoted. She edited her father’s work, namely The Collected Works of William Morris in 24 volumes and William Morris: Artist, Socialist, Writer, and published previously unknown fragments of his work. This paper considers the relationship between W. B. Yeats and May Morris, one which is often overlooked, focusing on how their correspondence and work reveals their continued engagement and promotion of William Morris’s legacy. The correspondence reveals the deep and complex relationship between Yeats and Morris and the important influence he was for Yeats. Yeats first met May in 1887, when he was a frequent visitor to Morris’s Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, and to the meetings of the Socialist League. May also worked with Yeats’s sisters Lily and Lolly, and trained Lily in embroidery at Morris & Co. Yeats’s work from around this time, such as The Wanderings of Oisin, is reinforced by the Arts and Crafts surroundings and environment of Morris’s Hammersmith house and by his interest in Pre-Raphaelitism. May and Yeats continued their acquaintance throughout their lives, writing to each other about William Morris and the impact of his legacy.
Panel 6c | Close Encounters: Intimacy and Relationships
Lucy Whitehead (Cardiff University) The Quest for Dickens: Rethinking the Relationship Between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ Biography.
In 1934, A. J. A Symons published a biography of the writer Frederick Rolfe, titled The Quest for Corvo, with the subtitle An Experiment in Biography. Recent criticism has supported Symons’s claim to biographical innovation. For Laura Marcus, ‘[t]he experimentation is [...] substantially based [...] in the foregrounding of the biographer’s quest for his subject’ (2002). Richard Holmes, the first Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia, places Corvo in his proposed canon of biographies for postgraduate study, on the grounds of its ‘significance within the development of the form’ (2002).
My paper will argue, however, that Corvo’s foregrounding of biographical pursuit might be read not so much as radical Modernist innovation, but as a more literary and stylish, but also dematerialised, take on existing Victorian texts and practices. The case study of late nineteenth-century Dickens biography offers a potential ancestry for Corvo’s seemingly experimental techniques, such as the incorporation within the text of letters to the biographer from his subject’s family and acquaintances.
John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (1872-74) was a popular target for late Victorian ‘Grangerization’ or extra-illustration, whereby certain owners of Forster’s biography of Dickens broke open the binding, and customised and stuffed their editions with additional manuscripts, letters and images, before re-binding the text in a new and extended form. Grangerized editions of this biography stage the processes of biographical research, and document the pursuit of further biographical information about the subject. They insert not only text, but the actual letters and envelopes from Dickens’s family in response to the Grangerizer’s quest for further biographical material. Pasted-in playbills and cast lists from theatricals in which Dickens performed show pencilled ticks or annotations against Dickens’s name, dramatising the quest of the Grangerizer who has searched for Dickens among the rest.
My paper will argue that what was experimental about Corvo was not so much its foregrounding of biographical pursuit, as its presentation of that pursuit in dematerialised and purely literary form. Grangerizations can help us to rethink the relationship between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ biography. The decision of the Dickens Grangerizers to house their insertions within a biography – in a period prior to the creation of the Dickens House Museum in 1925 – is suggestive about the ways that the rise of the heritage industry in the twentieth century may have impacted on the conception of biography as a genre. The establishment of heritage sites creates a rival host for biographical material, potentially siphoning away some of biography’s more exciting material properties and leaving a more purely literary space. Yet the interest in documenting biographical process is a source of continuity rather than rupture within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biography.
Panel 6c | Close Encounters: Intimacy and Relationships
Rachel Hollander (St. John’s University in New York) Between Sympathy and Hospitality: Ethics, Gender, and Colonialism in The Story of an African Farm.
Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) embodies the shift from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in many ways. Born in the Cape Colony to an English mother and German missionary father, she lived between continents, between literary-historical periods, and in the midst of the European scramble for Africa. I am particularly interested in tracing the ethics of her representations of gender and colonialism; I argue that she rewrites the Victorian novel to expose the limitations of the marriage plot for the emerging new woman while leaving space for the untold stories of others. Her first novel pays homage to her father’s Christian missionary ethic of universal sympathy but simultaneously records the inadequacy of his moral code in the corrupted landscape of colonial South Africa.
As an early feminist and creator of arguably the first “new woman” in English fiction, Schreiner populates The Story of an African Farm (1883) with nurturing men and non-maternal women. In this paper, I will juxtapose instances of paternal care and reproductive failure to suggest that Schreiner’s unconventional politics of gender and intimacy may serve to support a disruptive undercurrent of colonial resistance. While she is unwilling or unable to articulate that resistance in the voice of the African native, the novel as a whole creates radical spaces for the possibility of an alternate understanding of missionary hospitality.
Participating in recent attempts to address the complexity of the relationship between Schreiner’s remarkably radical understanding of gender and her initial indifference to the status of the South African natives, I examine African Farm in light of Gayatri Spivak’s famous critique of Jane Eyre (and its early feminist critics). While in the earlier novel the creole woman, Bertha Mason, must die to create a space for Jane’s conventionally happy ending of marriage and children, Schreiner’s novel fundamentally revises this plot. Lyndall refuses marriage and motherhood, and both she and her newborn baby die. Unable or unwilling to give explicit voice to African native resistance, Schreiner nevertheless rejects a narrative of European women’s progress, leaving behind an ambivalent space of still untold stories.