MA in Victorian Literature and Culture 2019-20

QUESTIONING THE VICTORIANS: TEXTS, CONTEXTS AND AFTERLIVES

Convenor: Dr Emma Major Email: [email protected] Office: King’s Manor K/G73; Phone: (01904 32)4974

This course surveys some of the major literary and cultural developments in, and the central preoccupations of, Victorian writing, as formulated by contemporaries and by recent critics and theorists. It introduces key thematic areas and problems in the interpretation of nineteenth-century literature across a broad range of genres. Sessions are grouped to enable students to sample theoretical, historical, and aesthetic approaches. Below is an outline of the module so you can see the whole term at a glance, followed by more detailed descriptions of seminars.

For each seminar there is Core Reading which is compulsory preparation, and also a selection of Further Reading which you are encouraged to sample as widely as possible. To give you an idea of what to expect, unless a tutor indicates otherwise a well-prepared MA student arriving for a seminar will have read all the core reading and at least three or four article-sized items—which could be, for example, book chapters—by different authors in the further reading.

THE TERM AT A GLANCE

Week 1: Introductory Meeting (Emma Major)* Week 2: Manifestos and Theses (John Bowen) Week 3: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (Trev Broughton) Week 4: The Invention of Irish Poetry (Matthew Campbell) Week 5: The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian ‘Literary’ Painters (Elizabeth Prettejohn)

Week 6: READING WEEK

Week 7: Marx’s Ghostly Matters (John Bowen) Week 8: The Victorians and Dialect (Matthew Townend) Week 9: Yellowing the 1890s: The Yellow Book (Nicoletta Asciuto) Week 10: Oscar Wilde: Art, Theatricality, Aestheticism and Comedy in the Fin-de-Siècle (Hugh Haughton)

* Please note this meeting is for students taking the Victorian Literature and Culture MA, rather than for all students taking Questioning the Victorians.

Seminars usually meet in the same room at the same time each week, but rooms and times can vary to accommodate staff availability. Please consult online timetables at the start of term for up to date information.

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SEMINAR INFORMATION

WEEK 2: MANIFESTOS AND THESES Prof. John Bowen

This seminar is designed as an introduction to Victorian Studies through the prism of three influential manifestos or theses, one from the nineteenth century, one from the period of high modernism and one from 2015. They are all in different ways partial, provocative, polemical and influential, and raise important questions about what, how and why we are studying, particularly how we might write and think about the ‘historical’.

Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 is probably the most influential single text written in the nineteenth century. Is it what you expected? How is it written? To whom is it addressed? What is surprising, strange, unexpected about it? There are multiple prefaces to later editions (Italian, German etc) but please don’t feel you don’t have to read them or grapple with the massive secondary literature. Just think about what they say and how.

Walter Benjamin’s 1939 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is in one way a response to Marx but also to the political crisis of the 1930s and to the literary modernism and cultural criticism in which Benjamin’s was embedded. It is explicitly about the relation of culture and history. How does it think about time? What claims does it make about culture? Do you think he is right?

In 2015 the ‘ten theses’ of the V21 collective livened up debate among Victorianists, and animated their self-consciousness about their locations, assumptions, methods and aspirations. The ten theses can be here: http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/ They generated a substantial debate which you can follow by signing up for the blog (on the right of the initial v21 screen), but please also try to respond directly to it. Should there be more of this sort of stuff in academic writing?

As preparation for this, our first session of the module, please chose a short passage from each of the texts that seems to you particularly provocative, puzzling, fascinating, wrong-headed, brilliant, intriguing, annoying, unsettling, mysterious, enigmatic, suggestive, absurd, contemptible, admirable, witty, disturbing, uncanny, incomprehensible, strange or simply worth discussing. Be prepared to tell us why you chose each passage and what drew you to it. There are no right answers or preferred approaches but do try to think about how these texts are written as well as what they are saying, and the relationship between their ‘literary’ or rhetorical qualities and the claims they are making.

Core Reading Walter Benjamin, ’Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations (London; Fontana 1973) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto intro. Gareth Stedman Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). Also available on line at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf V21 manifesto: http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/

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WEEK 3: ELIZABETH GASKELL’S NORTH AND SOUTH Dr Emma Major

In 1851 the national Census showed that for the first time in British history, more people lived in the city than in the country. The new industrial cities were seen as representing the best and the worst of Britain, and in the first half of the nineteenth century Manchester came under particular attention as the city in which commentators saw both the promise of a new Jerusalem and the horrors of the future. Gaskell’s novel asks many of the questions which troubled people of the time: How can a country call itself civilised, and Christian, and yet allow such poverty to exist? What should the relationship be between factory-owner and worker? Did the same class distinctions hold true for north and south of England? How obedient should one be, and to which laws? Did the new social order provide new opportunities for women? And what should the role of literature be in this troubled time?

Core Reading Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855), eds Sally Shuttleworth and Angus Easson (Oxford: , 2008) Please get this Oxford World’s Classics edition if possible.

Further Reading The Introduction to the OUP recommended edition is useful, as is its bibliography. See also:

Gordon Bigelow, Fiction, Famine, and the rise of Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976). Alison Chapman, ed., Elizabeth Gaskell (Duxford: Icon, 1999). W.A. Craik, Elizabeth Gaskell and the English Provincial Novel (London: Methuen, 1975). Edwin M. Eigner and George J. Worth, eds, Victorian Criticism of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Essays by Kate Flint, Linda M. Shires, Joseph W. Childers, and Nancy Armstrong, in Deirdre David, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) *e-book. Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Josephine M. Guy, The Victorian Social-Problem Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The rise and fall of the Victorian city (London: Phoenix, 2004). Patricia Ingham, Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (London: Routledge, 1996). Debra N. Mancoff and D.J. Trela, eds, Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and its Contexts (New York and London: Garland, 1996).

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Jill L. Matus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) * e-book. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989). Hilary Schor, Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Shelia M. Smith, The Other Nation: The poor in English novels of the 1840s and 1850s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 1993) Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

N.B. There are useful related appendices in Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, ed. Jennifer Foster (1848; Broadview Press, 2000) and in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. L.M. Findlay (1848; Broadview Press, 2004).

and some related primary reading . . . Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton (1848). Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1850). , Hard Times (1854). Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

WEEK 4: INVENTING IRISH POETRY: MOORE, FERGUSON, MANGAN Prof. Matthew Campbell

What was going on in Ireland before Yeats and Joyce? Was it all just gothic novels, famine and emigration, folksongs and music hall? Why do ‘Victorian poetry people’ not read nineteenth-century Irish poems? Just how can we think about Victoria's Great Britain if we are not aware it had been since the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801 also a United Kingdom? Why do we think about Victorian England but 19th Century Ireland? How did Irish literature emerge from a European nationalism and republicanism that largely left England alone? And which are the good poems that it would be a pleasure to read and understand? These and other questions will be raised in this seminar.

Core Reading A short anthology of texts will be circulated in advance via the VLE.

Further Reading . . . some anthologies Brooke, Stopford & Rolleston, T.W. A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (London: Murray, 1900). Deane, Seamus (gen. ed.). The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 3 vols. (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991). Morash, Chris (ed.). The Hungry Voice: The Poetry of the Irish Famine (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1989).

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Taylor, Geoffrey (ed.). Irish Poets of the Nineteenth Century(London: Routledge, 1951). Zimmermann, George Denis. Songs of Irish Rebellion 2nd edn. (Dublin: Four Courts, 2002).

. . . some History and Criticism Arnold, Matthew, On The Study of Celtic Literature (1867) [various editions, including online at Project Gutenberg]. Campbell, Matthew, Irish Poetry Under the Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ———, and Michael Perraudin (eds), The Voice of the People 1760-1914 ([s.l.]: Anthem, 2012). Deane Seamus. Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 (London: Faber, 1985). Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). Hunt, Una, Sources and Style in Moore’s Irish Melodies (London: Routledge, 2017). Kiberd Declan. Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995). Leerssen, Joep. Remembrance and Imagination (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). Lloyd, David. Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). McCormack, W.J. From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork, Cork University Press, 1994). MacDonagh, Thomas. Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916) (Dublin: Relay, 1996). O’Malley, Patrick, Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ó Tuama, Sean. Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995). Princeton University Library Chronicle (Special Issue on Irish Poetry), 59, 3 (1998). Schirmer, Gregory A. Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Sturgeon, Sinead, (ed.), Essays on James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak (Houndsmills, Baskingstoke, New York: Palgrave, 2014). Vance, Norman. Irish Literature: A Social History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1900). Welch, Robert, Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980). White, Harry. The Keeper’s Recital (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). ———. Musical Constructions of Nationalism (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001).

WEEK 5: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES: VICTORIAN ‘LITERARY’ PAINTERS Prof. Elizabeth Prettejohn

This seminar will explore the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, their close associates and followers. Why are works of Pre-Raphaelite visual art overwhelmingly popular with museum and gallery audiences, yet treated with condescension or disdain by many art historians and curators? The seminar will address this question in a variety of ways, and will pay particular attention to the frequent charge that Pre-Raphaelite painting is ‘too literary’.

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Core Reading — well, actually, Looking Please familiarize yourselves with works by Pre-Raphaelite artists in the collections of Tate, the Ashmolean (Oxford), or Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which can easily be accessed through their websites (listed below). You may make your own choice of which works to study; please choose at least 4-6 works by different artists, for example: , Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Allston Collins, , Arthur Hughes, , , , Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, , Joanna Boyce Wells, . You may want to take advantage of the Pre-Raphaelite Sisters exhibition at the NPG (see below) to choose at least one work by a woman artist.

Tate: search at http://www.tate.org.uk/art/

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery: Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource at http://www.preraphaelites.org/

See also the gallery installation shots at http://www.birminghammuseums.org.uk/bmag/highlights/the-pre-raphaelites

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: search at http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/objects/makesearch.php?pmu=730&mu=732

Another useful resource for finding pictures in public collections is the BBC’s Your Paintings website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

Please try to make an opportunity to see the important exhibition Pre- Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 17 October 2019–26 January 2020; for details see: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2019/pre-raphaelite-sisters/

Further Reading Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate, 2012). Colin Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing (London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012). John Holmes, The Pre-Raphaelites and Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018). Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate, 2000). Elizabeth Prettejohn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); also available as e-book. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). James Sambrook, ed., Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Allan Staley, The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; 2nd ed., New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001).

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WEEK 6: READING WEEK (NO SEMINAR)

WEEK 7: MARX’S GHOSTLY MATTERS Prof. John Bowen

Karl Marx was a contemporary of Dickens and George Eliot and did much of his most important writing in England. His legacies have continued to haunt the study of Victorian literature and culture and this seminar explores some of the key moments of that presence and inheritance. This will also be an opportunity to encounter and work through an important text by perhaps the most influential and important of all modern philosophers, Jacques Derrida. As it can be quite demanding, I’ve set only one chapter so that our discussion will have a clear focus, attentive to its writing and argument.

Please begin with The Eighteenth Brumaire, followed by Stallybrass, followed by Derrida. You’ll need to have a sense of the political and cultural events that Marx is seeking to understand for The Eighteenth Brumaire. Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 (Penguin) and Robert Gildea’s Barricades and Borders (Oxford) give succinct summaries of Louis Napoleon’s rise to power and what preceded it. Think about how Marx writes as well as his argument: there is a striking metaphorical and figurative exuberance in his writing which both articulates and dislocates a complex sense of how and why social and political representation happen in the forms they do. Is it a very different Marx from what you might expect?

Core Reading Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994) exordium and Ch 1 and 3. Karl Marx ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’ , in Surveys from Exile ed. David Fernbach, especially sections 1 and 7. Also available on line at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ Peter Stallybrass, ‘Marx’s coat’ in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), 183-207.

Further reading Geoff Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). The best single volume introduction. Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2016). Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: Norton, 2000).

WEEK 8: THE VICTORIANS AND DIALECT Prof. Matthew Townend

What were some of the dominant ideas about language in the Victorian period? One conspicuous feature was a surge in interest in dialect, and for two main reasons: first, because dialect was regional, and second, because it was historical. The issue of regionality is the more obvious of the two, and ties in with other, easily observed

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The issue of historicity requires a little more explanation. In the nineteenth century, the new discipline of philology – the so-called ‘science of language’ – revolutionized attitudes to language. Philology taught its adherents to view language historically, in terms of change over time, but also comparatively, in terms of family connections between languages and reconstructed ancestor-forms. It furthermore accentuated the primacy of spoken language over written, and thus foregrounded the value of non-standard modern dialects. In emphasizing these points, philology formed part of broader historicist movements in the nineteenth century, and had obvious affinities with other new disciplines such as folklore, comparative mythology, and (of course) evolutionary biology. Victorian Britain’s supreme philological achievement was the production of the Oxford English Dictionary – begun in 1857, though not completed till 1928.

In this seminar, we will consider the Victorian engagement with dialect by focusing on two Dorset writers – one very famous, the other somewhat less so – and we will look at both poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. Both William Barnes (1801- 86) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) were heavily influenced by Victorian philology. Barnes was an important early worker in the fields of dialectology and historical philology, and should probably be regarded as the most influential dialect poet of the nineteenth century. As a poet, Hardy was more concerned with how the enlarged vistas of philology made available a whole range of forms and words, from different times and places; but as a novelist, of course, he became one of the most important writers to use dialect speech for some of his characters.

Our primary texts will be: (1) a selection of poems by Barnes; (2) Barnes’ ‘Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect of the English Language’ (published as an introduction to his 1844 Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect); (3) Hardy’s ‘Preface’ to his 1908 edition of Select Poems of William Barnes; and (4) Hardy’s short story ‘The Son’s Veto’, first published in 1891 and collected in Life’s Little Ironies (1894).

Although our focus will be on Barnes and Hardy, we will also think more widely about the place of dialect in Victorian literature and thought. So in preparation for the seminar, please look back at North and South, to consider Gaskell’s use of dialect; and think also about other writers you have read who deploy dialect in either fiction or poetry – such as the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, or Hopkins. Why do such writers use dialect? What values and meanings does it bear?

Reading

All the primary texts will be made available in advance: you should read these carefully, and bring copies along to the seminar. The secondary reading is all available electronically, as either e-books or e-journals; please read a sample of the items listed.

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Core Reading Valentine Cunningham (ed.), The Victorians: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 79-89 [digitized] William Barnes, ‘A Dissertation on the Dorset Dialect of the English Language’ (1844), in T.L. Burton and K.K. Ruthven (eds), The Complete Poems of William Barnes: Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1-19 [e-book] Thomas Hardy, ‘Preface’ to Select Poems of William Barnes (1908), in Michael Millgate (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 291-97 [digitized] Thomas Hardy, ‘The Son’s Veto’, in Life’s Little Ironies, ed. Alan Manford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 33-48 [digitized]

Further Reading . . . on Barnes and Hardy T.L. Burton and K.K. Ruthven, ‘Dialect Poetry, William Barnes and the Literary Canon’, English Literary History 76 (2009), 309-41. W.J. Keith, ‘Thomas Hardy’s Edition of William Barnes’, Victorian Poetry 15 (1977), 121-31. Dennis Taylor, ‘The Victorian Philological Contexts of Hardy’s Poetry’, in Phillip Mallett (ed.), Thomas Hardy in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 231-41 [For much fuller treatment, see Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).] Marcus Waithe, ‘William Barnes: Views of Field Labour in Poems of Rural Life’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 460-74.

. . .on Victorian dialect and philology Sue Edney, ‘Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections’, Literature Compass 8/9 (2011), 660-74. Susan L. Ferguson, ‘Drawing Fictional Lines: Dialect and Narrative in the Victorian Novel’, Style 32.1 (1998), 1-17. Jane Hodson (ed.), Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2017). Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. Chapter 4. ‘The Philological Society of London: lexicography as national philology’. Matthew Townend, ‘Victorian Medievalisms’ in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 166- 83, esp. 174-79.

WEEK 9: YELLOWING THE 1890S: THE YELLOW BOOK Dr Nicoletta Asciuto

Yellow and green were the two colours appropriated by Decadent writers and artists as symbolical of natural decay: this week, we shall closely scrutinize one particular shade of late Victorian and Decadent yellow, The Yellow Book. ‘[T]he Oscar Wilde of periodicals’, as it was welcomed by one of its first reviewers, The Yellow Book was relatively short-lived (13 volumes over three years) yet it caused a real sensation amongst the late Victorians which still fascinates scholars today. With its blend of

9 literature, art, satire, erotica, and even tradition, The Yellow Book quickly established itself as challenging Victorian morals and the precursor of modern literary magazines. In this seminar, we will discuss the texts of The Yellow Book in its original publishing context as well as consider its wider social, cultural, aesthetic, political, and literary value for the end of the Victorian age and for the looming twentieth century.

Core Reading The Yellow Book: An Illustrated Quarterly (London: The Bodley Head/John Lane, 1894-1897). The Yellow Book is available in hard copy in the library, as well as via the ProQuest database (via Library website). It is also easily available in open access via the website The Yellow Nineties Online (www.1890s.ca). Please come to the seminar having read Volume I (1894) of The Yellow Book in full.

Please also read the following two reviews of The Yellow Book’s first volume: ‘“A Yellow Melancholy”: The New Quarterly.’ Review of The Yellow Book, Vol. 1. Current Literature June 1894: 503. [electronic resource] ‘A Yellow Impertinence.’ Review of The Yellow Book, Vol. 1. Critic 26 May 1894: 360. [electronic resource]

Further Reading Aubrey Beardsley, The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley, ed. Henry Maas, J.L. Duncan and W.G. Good (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1970). Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850-1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2001). John Davidson, A True and Full Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (London: Ward & Downey Limited, 1895). Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). Ian Fletcher, Decadence and the 1890s (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1890). Linda K. Hughes, ‘Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book’, Studies in English Literature 44 (2004): 849-72. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925). Katherine Lyon Mix, A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). James G. Nelson, The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Murray Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993). Mark W. Turner, ‘Urban Encounters and Visual Play in The Yellow Book.’ Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, ed. Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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WEEK 10: OSCAR WILDE: ART, THEATRICALITY, AESTHETICISM AND COMEDY IN THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE Prof. Hugh Haughton

This seminar will look at Wilde in relation to theatricality, aestheticism and sexuality, setting his hyper-self-conscious farce The Importance of Being Earnest against two critical dialogues from Intentions (1890) and his fictional essay on Shakespeare, ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’

Wilde was a master of numerous art-forms – poetry, theatre, fiction, fairy-tale, novel, review and critical essay among them – but he was also a major theorist of art, working in and against the English tradition of Ruskin, Arnold, Morris and Pater, and the French tradition of Gautier, Baudelaire and Huysmans. The nature of his own art as well as his thinking about art have been subject to scandal and controversy from the first, and we will look at the changing critical reception of Wilde from his own time to ours, as well as at the forms of theatrical questioning and self- questioning he practised in his plays and prose. Wilde is in many ways a transitional figure between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modern’, and we will explore how Wilde’s writings bring together art and scandal, comedy and sexuality, in a way that continues to challenge our notions of cultural, moral and biographical identity.

Core Reading Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ed. Russell Jackson (London: New Mermaid, Methuen, 1988). Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, ‘The Critic as Artist’ in Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose, ed. Linda Dowling (London: Penguin, 2001). Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Critic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968).

Further Reading . . .on Wilde Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987) . Josephine M. Guy. ed, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume 4 Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Hugh Haughton, ‘Oscar Wilde: Thinking Style’, in Marcus Waithe and Michael Hurley, eds, Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth- Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Kerry Powell and Peter Raby eds., Oscar Wilde in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Peter Raby ed. The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’ in Against Interpretation (New York: Delta, 1966). Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Oscar Wilde and the Queer Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

. . .on The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde’s theatre Peter Raby ‘Wilde’s Comedies of Society’ and Russell Jackson, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ in Peter Raby ed. Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997).

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Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Kerry Powell, Acting Wilde: Victorian Sexuality, Theatre and Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

. . . on Intentions and Wilde’s essays Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). Lawrence Danson, Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in his Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Emma Major/James Williams, August 2019.

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