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Introduction Notes Introduction 1. Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1914), p. 22. 2. For an account of the development of ideas about Decadence in nineteenth-century France, see A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature 1830–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958) and R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Arnold, 1983), pp. 15–33. 3. Nicholas White, Introduction, Against Nature (A rebours), trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xiv. 4. N. White, p. xxiv. 5. G. A. Cevasco, The Breviary of the Decadence: J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and English Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2001), p. 13. 6. N. White, pp. xi, xxv. 7. George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972), p. 169. 8. Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries (New York: Dutton, 1916), p. 294. Cevasco’s Breviary of the Decadence provides an exhaustive account of Huysmans’s influence on the British writers. In addition to Moore, Wilde, and Symons, he examines Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, John Gray, André Raffalovich, Eric Stenbock, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Evelyn Waugh. 9. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 189 10. National Vigilance Association, Pernicious Literature, Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George G. Becker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 355. 11. For more detail about the role of circulating libraries and their effect on the novel in Victorian England see Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Devon, UK: David and Charles, 1970). 12. These essays are reprinted in abridged form in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (eds), The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c. 1800–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 111–20; George Moore, Literature at Nurse; or, Circulating Morals (New York: Garland, 1978). 13. George Moore, ‘Les Décadents’, Court and Society Review (19 January 1887), pp. 57–8; Havelock Ellis, ‘A Note Upon Paul Bourget’, initially printed in Pioneer magazine in 1889 (Views and Reviews: A Selection of Uncollected Articles 1884–1932, first series 1884–1919 [London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932], pp. 48–60); Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Considerations Suggested by Churton Collins’ Illustrations of Tennyson’, originally appeared in the Century Guild Hobby Horse (Retrospective Reviews, vol. 1 [London: Lane, 1896], pp. 19–28); Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 88 (November 1893), pp. 858–67; Lionel Johnson, ‘A Note Upon the Practice and Theory of Verse at the Present Time Obtaining in France’, Century Guild Hobby Horse 6 (1891), pp. 61–6. 14. Bruce Gardiner, The Rhymers’ Club: A Social and Intellectual History (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 128, 129. 171 172 Notes 15. A Mere Accident (1887), Spring Days (1888), Mike Fletcher (1889), and his autobio- graphical Confessions of a Young Man (1888). 16. Stuart Mason provides a thorough documentation of the reception of Wilde’s novel and the controversy that ensued (Art and Morality [London: Frank Palmer, 1912]). 17. Thornton, p. 42. 18. See, for example, Thomas Bradfield, ‘A Dominant Note of Some Recent Fiction’, Westminster Review 142 (1894), pp. 537–45; ‘The Damnation of Decadence’, National Observer (23 February 1895), pp. 390–1; Janet E. Hogarth, ‘Literary Degenerates’, Fortnightly Review 63 (1895), pp. 586–92; ‘Morbid and Unclean Literature’, Whitehall Review (20 April 1895), p. 13; James Ashcroft Noble, ‘The Fiction of Sexuality’, Contemporary Review 67 (1895), pp. 490–8. Harry Quilter, ‘The Gospel of Intensity’, Contemporary Review (June 1895), pp. 761–82. J. A. Spender, The New Fiction (a Protest Against Sex-Mania), and Other Papers (New York: Garland, 1984); Hugh E. M. Stutfield, ‘Tommyrotics’, Blackwoods 179 (June 1895), pp. 833–45. 19. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1958), p. 4. 20. Quoted in Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 32. 21. Max Beerbohm, ‘Enoch Soames’, Seven Men and Two Others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 3–44. This story was first published in 1916 in the Century magazine before being included in the 1919 collection Seven Men and Two Others. 22. Arthur Symons, ‘A Literary Causerie’, Savoy 4 (August 1896), pp. 91–3. This essay was subsequently revised and reprinted as an obituary for Dowson and as the introduction to the Bodley Head edition of his verse; Arthur Symons, ‘Aubrey Beardsely: An Essay with a Preface’, The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), pp. 15–36. Among the notable memoirs and histories of the 1890s that first appeared in the 1910s and 1920s are Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (London: Putnam’s, 1926); Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York: Knopf, 1923); and W. G. Blaikie Murdoch, The Renaissance of the Nineties (London: De La More Press, 1911). 23. For a discussion of the influence of the 1890s on 1990s popular culture see Philip Hoare’s article, ‘Symbols of Decay’, Tate: The Art Magazine 13 (Winter 1997), pp. 22–9. Contemporary films have also sparked the current interest in the period, notably Todd Haynes’s film Velvet Goldmine (1998), in which Wilde is represented as a progenitor of 1970s glam rock and Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001), which juxtaposes late-nineteenth century French Decadent music hall culture with contemporary pop culture. Christopher Dickey’s article ‘Absinthe’s Second Coming’ indicates how the reintroduction of absinthe in Britain has also sparked a revival of interest in the Decadents (Cigar Aficionado [March/April 2001], 5 September 2005) Ͻhttp://www.cigaraficionado.com/Ͼ. Path: Library; Magazine Archive. 24. The OED defines myth as ‘a popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth’ (definition 2c, Oxford English Dictionary (online version), University of Alberta, Edmonton, 4 August 2005, Ͻhttp:// dictionary. oed.com/Ͼ. 25. W. B. Yeats, Introduction, Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892–1935 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. x. 26. W. B. Yeats, Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), p. 200. 27. Ibid., p. 208. 28. Quoted in Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 72. Notes 173 29. Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 71. 30. Karl Beckson, ‘Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club’, Yeats Studies 1 (1971), p. 41. 31. Gardiner, Rhymers’, 186. 32. From Yeats’s Essays and Introductions, qtd. in Gardiner, Rhymers’, 131. 33. Barbara Charlesworth, Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965); Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Methuen, 1961); Thornton, Decadent Dilemma. 34. M. H. Abrams, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature.vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1993), p. 1612. 35. Joseph Bristow, Preface, The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, ed. Joseph Bristow (Columbus, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. ix–x. This book of essays offers a substantial re-evaluation of the achievements of the Decadents as poets and also illuminates the contributions of women writers to the poetry of this period. 36. John Munro, The Decadent Poetry of the Eighteen Nineties (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1970), pp. 57, 64. 37. Charlesworth, pp. 122, 123. 38. Hough, pp. 202, 204. 39. Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 144. 40. Regenia Gagnier, ‘A Critique of Practical Aesthetics’, Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp. 270–6. 41. Abrams, p. 1613. 42. Yeats, Autobiography, p. 200. 43. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. viii. 44. Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1971), p. 1090. 45. The alienated artist was also a theme in much of the Decadent poetry of the period. See, for example, Beckson’s discussion in ‘Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club’, pp. 33–5. 46. Numerous critics have commented on the relationship between Decadence and Modernism. In addition to Charlesworth, Hough, Munro, and Thornton, see also J. E. Chamberlin, ‘From High Decadence to High Modernism’, Queen’s Quarterly 87 (1980), pp. 591–610; David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Murray G. H. Pittock, Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 175–89; Edmund Wilson, Axël’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Norton, 1959); Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 244–83. 47. Thornton, p. 200. 48. Charlesworth, pp. 122–23; Munro, p. 73; Hough, pp. 208–12. 49. Hough, p. 215. 50. Julie Codell discusses a number of popular images of the artist including the bohemian (Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain ca. 1870–1910 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]). In the Victorian period, she argues, the bohemian was often represented as a bourgeois gentleman as in the works of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray (pp. 96–7). At the same time, she insists, there was a ‘diabolic, antisocial, and threatening’ image of the bohemian as represented in Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Morley Roberts’s Immortal Youth (1896), and George Moore’s A Modern Lover (1883) (pp. 96, 99). This latter model was certainly what the Decadents drew on in their self-representation. 174 Notes For more on the artist as dandy see Ellen Moers’s excellent study, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960). 51. Linda Dowling, Aestheticism and Decadence: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1977), pp.
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