Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
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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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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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
Read moreAs 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
Read moreTranslating 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
Read moreSimon 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
Read moreSerena 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
Read moreby 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
Read moreIn ‘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
Read moreRecent 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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