Tag: Oscar Wilde

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

Other

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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The Tragic Poet: Whose Name was Writ in Water

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

There are those who consider the words of the sanguine poet scarcely worth the reading. A prescription formula for funerals, heartbreak and teenage angst, poetry has long been established as the literary tonic for the dilapidated human condition. In the name of authenticity, it naturally follows that the greater the suffering of a maudlin bard, the greater their work and legacy. Mythology has romanticised and popularised the tragic poet, a familiar archetype in celebrity literary culture. It is the reason

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Ashley Cook, Germany and the British fin de siècle

Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy

As well as researching and teaching the fin de siècle, I have been finding time to wander around the German university town I am currently living in. Looking at all the beautiful historic architecture – which includes many nineteenth-century buildings and statues – has made me aware of how relatively alien it all is. As a scholar born and raised in the UK, I am used to looking up at the Victoria and Albert Museum to see the fin de

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The Aesthetic Experience across Three Centuries

Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Translating Louise Rosenblatt’s PhD (1931) on ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ Richard Whitney Richard Whitney’s current research is on the work of Louise Rosenblatt and the poet H.D., and looks at the humanistic nature of literary experience and those who pursue this as a form of wisdom-knowledge inquiry. He has presented papers on Rosenblatt and Ottoline Morrell, and has a forthcoming publication on Ottoline’s presence in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In 2014 he was awarded an AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership

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The Archive and Ornament

Published in JVC

Simon Reader (University if Toronto) This post accompanies Simon Reader’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. “But I fall into the lace of the text, the vellum; caught there, I contemplate my masters.” Lisa Robertson, Nillings Manuscript collections may be usefully regarded as ornaments adorning the literary canon. They strike me as a kind of lace bordering otherwise functional clothing. For one thing, getting to the artifacts can be costly. Sitting with Oscar Wilde’s notebooks

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Victorian Literature and the History and Philosophy of Psychology

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University In March I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at the British Psychological Society’s History and Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) Conference at the University of Surrey. This session was convened by Gregory Tate (Surrey), and included four papers: ‘Definitions of sanity and insanity in sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ by Helena Ifill (Sheffield), ‘Diagnosis and mental trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’ by Alexandra Lewis (Aberdeen), ‘The self-diagnosis of Sydney

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Men, Sex, and a Selfish Giant – Review of Wilde (1997)

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Fern Riddell, (King’s College, London) [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7NGglgjCU[/youtube] “You shocked them. But the more frivolous you seem, the more serious you are, aren’t you?” -Bosie to Oscar Wilde Now, Oscar Wilde has been a love of mine since I read ‘A Picture of Dorian Grey’ during my A Levels. His style of writing, and his observations on the frailty of human interaction, is so delicate in its understanding that it will always be timeless. Wilde has often divided critics; there are those

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Dominic Janes, ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist’

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In ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist,’ Dominic Janes’ continues to develop his study of the history of Christian ethics and aesthetics—first, in the context of the early Church, and secondly, in relation to the nineteenth century. In Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860 (2009), he explored the discourses surrounding ‘idolatry’, which was, in a narrow sense, the worship of idols, but, in a broad sense, could mean

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Elisha Cohn, ”One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain’

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Recent studies have demonstrated how new theories of materiality in the late nineteenth century shaped conceptions of everyday objects—top-hats, teapots, green carnations—yet have not extended this research to the burgeoning late-Victorian field of the neurosciences, and its conception of the mind as material. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde traces ‘the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain’ (280). As his notebooks from his undergraduate days at Oxford show, Wilde was fascinated by

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The Importance of Being Earnest Live in HD

Victorians Beyond the Academy

On 2 June 2011, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Wilde’s masterpiece will be broadcast live in HD at cinemas throughout the United States and internationally, with repeat performances being shown periodically until 28 June. To complete the experience, the Playgoer’s Guide to the production is available online, offering a brief sketch of the play’s original cultural context. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcTmJHsbOXQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] It is interesting that the information in the guide, as well as some of the trailers and videos on the theatre

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