Notes Introduction 1. Oxford English Dictionary. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 9. 1 Influence, Image, and the Movement of Time 1. Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, 59– 71. 2. Elizabeth Petrino, ‘Allusion, Echo, and Literary Influence in Emily Dickinson’, The Emily Dickinson Journal, 19:1 (2010), 80– 102 (p. 80). 3. Ibid. 4. Andrew Elfenbein, ‘On the Discrimination of Influences’, Modern Language Quarterly, 69:4 (2008), 481– 507 (p. 486). 5. Katherine Haake, ‘Against Reading’, in Can it Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy (Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 2007), 14– 27 (p. 21). 6. Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), p. 175. 7. Alan Sinfield, ‘Culture, Consensus and Difference: Angus Wilson to Alan Hollinghurst’, in British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945– 1999, ed. Alistair Davies and Alan Sinfield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 83– 102 (pp. 95– 6). And to this list I would add: a refinement of Christopher Isherwood, a judgement of Robert Mapplethorpe, and a cultiva- tion of Harold Acton. 8. Bristow, Effeminate England, pp. 174– 5. Taking into account Hollinghurst’s recurrent fascination with Henry James’s ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888) and ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894), this image of a forbidding textual archive seems especially relevant, and it is, indeed, the challenges of influence pre- sented by these Jamesian archives to which I will turn in later chapters. 9. Alistair Stead, ‘ Self- Translation and the Arts of Transposition in Allan [sic] Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star’, in Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics, ed. Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 361– 85 (pp. 361– 2). 10. David Alderson, ‘Desire as Nostalgia: The Novels of Alan Hollinghurst’, in Territories of Desire in Queer Culture: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries, ed. David Alderson and Linda Anderson (Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 29– 48 (p. 44). 11. Denis Flannery, ‘The Powers of Apostrophe and the Boundaries of Mourning: Henry James, Alan Hollinghurst, and Toby Litt’, Henry James Review, 26:3 (2005), 293– 305 (pp. 296– 7), my italics. 154 Notes to Chapter 1 155 12. Julie Rivkin, ‘Writing the Gay ’80s with Henry James: David Leavitt’s A Place I’ve Never Been and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty’, Henry James Review, 26:3 (2005), 282– 92 (p. 282). 13. Georges Letissier, ‘Queer, Quaint and Camp: Alan Hollinghurst’s Own Return to the English Tradition’, Études anglaises, 60:2 (2007), 198– 211 (p. 199). 14. On The Picture of Dorian Gray as the ‘locus classicus of the modern homo- sexual novel’, see: Jeffrey Meyers, Homosexuality and Literature, 1890– 1930 (London: Athlone, 1977), p. 14. 15. On The Great Gatsby as ‘a story of love between men’ mediated by the con- testation of ‘paternal authority’, see Denis Flannery, On Sibling Love, Queer Attachment and American Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 9. 16. In his review for The New York Times, Anthony Quinn was quick to point out possible sources of names in The Line of Beauty, particularly Powell and Fitzgerald. Flannery, on the other hand, has seen the names as growing from a Jamesian corpus. See: Denis Flannery, ‘The Powers of Apostrophe and the Boundaries of Mourning: Henry James, Alan Hollinghurst, and Toby Litt’, Henry James Review, 26:3 (2005), 293– 305 (p. 297); Anthony Quinn, ‘The Last Good Summer’, New York Times, 4 October 2004, p. 19. 17. In a certain sense, The Line of Beauty is a roman- à- clef that takes for its back- ground a vast cast of characters from nineteenth- and twentieth- century literature: the key to this novel lies not in identifying fictionalized figures from the real world, but in identifying fictional figures that have been reallocated and recast. Yet in a novel so happily bound to the conventions of post- Jamesian realism, such a technique – one which breaches the boundaries of parody and pastiche – is not simply unexpected, but quite positioned to evade immediate detection. 18. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 10. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 15. 22. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 3– 36 (p. 3). 23. Leon Roudiez, in Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 15. 24. Julia Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’ (1969), in Desire in Language, p. 36. 25. J.- K. Huysmans, À rebours (1884; repr. London: Penguin, 2003), p. 49. 26. Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate (1945; repr. New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 83. 27. Laura White, ‘The Rejection of Beauty in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited’, Renascence, 58:3 (2006), 180– 94 (p. 184). 28. Ibid. p. 185. 29. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945; repr. New York: Little, Brown, 1999), p. 164. 30. Ibid. p. 169. 31. Mitford, Pursuit of Love, p. 83. 32. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 64. 156 Notes to Chapter 1 33. White, ‘Rejection of Beauty’, p. 184. 34. Huysmans’s novel is, however, still explicitly invoked in The Folding Star: ‘I had him closeted with me in des Esseintes- like privacy, in a sealed world of silk and fur and absolute indulgence’ (FS 224). 35. Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), p. 12. 36. Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. ix. 37. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 7. 38. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 9. 39. It was not until the second edition of The Anxiety of Influence that Bloom, in a new preface, wrote on Shakespeare, the poet he has long and staunchly held as the most central figure in English literature, and, therefore, the very cause of influence anxiety. 40. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 3. 41. Ibid. p. 106. 42. See Elfenbein on the Romantic ‘cult of genius’ and homosexuality: Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 43. Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (London: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 39. 44. Bloom, Anxiety, pp. 5– 6. 45. Exactly 100 years previously, the ‘Advertisement’ to the 1798 anonymous edition of Lyrical Ballads, which would be replaced in the three subsequent editions with Wordsworth’s more famous ‘Preface’, would confess that, ‘THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE was professedly written in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the elder poets; but with few exceptions the author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally intelligible for these last three centuries.’ Perhaps Wilde’s failure, then, is in not ‘professedly [writing] in imitation of the style as well as the spirit of the elder poets’. See: Michael Mason, ed., ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads, 1798 edition, Lyrical Ballads (London: Longman, 1992), p. 35. 46. Qtd in Bloom, Anxiety, p. 6. The bracketed text has been added from the orig- inal: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; repr. Ware: Wordsworth, 1992), p. 18. 47. Wilde, Picture, p. 102. 48. Bloom, Anxiety, p. 6. 49. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Harcourt, 1975), pp. 37– 44 (p. 38). 50. T.S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Harcourt, 1975), pp. 59– 67 (pp. 64– 5). 51. Ibid. p. 65. 52. Bloom, Map, p. 19. 53. Ibid. p. 49. 54. Roland Barthes’s use of Balzac’s castrato in ‘The Death of the Author’ becomes especially poignant in light of Gilbert and Gubar’s line of reason- ing, and particularly in the light of the opening question of The Madwoman Notes to Chapter 2 157 in the Attic: ‘is a pen a metaphorical penis?’ Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn (1979; repr. London: Yale University Press, 2000). The absence of the castrato’s penis is not only pivotal to the contriv- ances of ‘Sarrasine’, but pivotal to Barthes’s argument that not only can an absence of a penis/pen engender authorship, but, indeed, authorship is demonstrably the absence of such an instrument. ‘Sarrasine’ is an ideal story for Barthes to use, in that its representational power here far outstretches its implicit textual significance, and heralds future reconsiderations of the relationship that exists between texts, and the relationship between author and reader that will necessarily inform this. 55. One of the few sustained accounts of gay literary influence is Christopher Lane’s short review article, ‘Gay Tradition and the Anxiety of Influence’. In it, he reviews Bergman’s Gaiety Transfigured (1991), Mark Lilly’s Lesbian and Gay Writing (1990), and Claude Summers’s Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (1990). See: Christopher Lane, ‘Gay Tradition and the Anxiety of Influence’, Contemporary Literature, 34:2 (1993), 293– 303.