‘I wear men’s lives’: The Maternal Femme Fatale in R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Crimson Weaver’

Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868-1917) was a prolific writer who, over the course of his career, produced 22 novels and nearly 100 short stories. His fiction is notable for the way in which he blends together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange stories that, according to critic and Gilchrist editor Dan Pieterson, anteceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] He was certainly recognised and praised to a certain degree by his literary contemporaries. H.G. Wells ranked him among such successful

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Symbolism and Censorship in Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Portrait of Himself in Bed’

At 22 years old, Aubrey Beardsley was in the midst of one of the most prosperous periods of his short life, thanks to regular employment with the quarterly artistic and literary periodical The Yellow Book (fig. 1). For the journal’s third volume, published in October 1894, Beardsley created an illustration entitled Portrait of Himself in Bed (fig. 2).[1] This drawing was printed using the line block technique, which necessitated his use of only black and white, with no middle tones.

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“Writing Between the Lines”: Style as Walter Pater’s Esoteric Teaching of Queerness

Walter Pater, late nineteenth-century aesthete, is sometimes considered a quietist lacking political engagement. Heather Love points out that Pater has been closely linked to the ills of aestheticism, in particular, political quietism. She challenges this view by proposing to read Pater’s works “not as a refusal of politics but rather as a politics of refusal”.[1] I argue that Pater is not only engaged in a “politics of refusal” but also covertly celebrates unorthodox queerness esoterically to ensure that his radical

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Conference Report: Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920

Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920,  University of Oxford, 17-18 June 2014 Report by Katharina Herold (University of Oxford) and Eleanor Reeds (University of Connecticut) Speakers from an international range of institutions came together for a lively intellectual investigation into the agents of these movements, the means by which they achieved cultural significance, and their current relevance in times of globalized literary exchange. In his opening keynote address, Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan) outlined the vital influence of Jewish intellectual and

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