Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Joanna Spear, The Business of Armaments: Armstrongs, Vickers and the International Arms Trade, 1855–1955
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Layers of Clothing in Hjalmar Söderberg’s Writing: Translations of ‘The Fur Coat’ (1898) and ‘A Grey Waistcoat or Justice in Munich’ (1913) with an Introduction
Get PDFMy translation of two of Söderberg’s short stories aims to illuminate how focusing on the role of clothing as literary device in Söderberg’s writing can provide a window into the distinctive kind of decadent style Söderberg developed. Although Söderberg incorporates meticulous descriptions of clothing throughout his writing, in these two stories clothing becomes a dramatic agent that precipitates events. This suggests the particular signifying functions that clothing takes on: how it can play a role in the negotiation of broader social issues, and how seemingly ordinary events and everyday objects can expose the hidden depths and the more troubling aspects of modern love and life. The two stories were also selected to display different facets of Söderberg’s decadent style – ‘A Grey Waistcoat’ is more comedic whilst ‘The Fur Coat’ is more tragic. While ‘The Fur Coat’ has been previously translated into English (by M. Ekenberg in 1934 and by Carl Lofmark in 1987), there are no previous English translations of ‘A Grey Waistcoat’
‘Oh, London dear!’: Belated Decadence and the Queer City in Ronald Firbank’s Vainglory and Caprice
Get PDFIn his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935 (1936), W. B. Yeats famously declared that, after the so-called Yellow Nineties, ‘in 1900 everybody got down off his stilts; henceforth nobody drank absinthe with his black coffee; nobody went mad; nobody committed suicide; nobody joined the Catholic church; or if they did I have forgotten’.[i] Yeats’s remark is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Still, Yeats had forgotten at least one writer, and very few people have remembered him since. Ronald Firbank, who wrote his best-known novels during, and immediately after, the First World War, stayed up on his stilts, half drank himself to death, converted to the Catholic Church, and was widely considered to be mad – or, at least, very eccentric. One person who did remember Firbank was E. M. Forster, whose 1929 article on Firbank was reprinted in the same year as Yeats’s Modern Verse. ‘[T]here is nothing up to date’ about him, Forster states: rather, Firbank is ‘fin de siècle, as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the Yellow Book; his mind inherits the furniture and his prose the cadences of Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill’.[ii] Definitionally, decadence is always belated. But Firbank’s was doubly so, because he had missed out on the 1890s. He was too late to be belated when the men and women of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ had been feeling belated in exactly the same way that he would a few decades later.
[i] W. B. Yeats, ‘Introduction’, in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, ed. by W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. xi.
[ii] E. M. Forster, ‘Ronald Firbank’, in Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), pp. 135-41 (p. 137)
‘Wanted Dead or Alive’: The Outlaw in Modern War
Get PDFThis article examines a little noticed prohibition on outlawry contained in some military manuals on the laws of war and asks where it came from. It establishes that it is not contained in a treaty or in customary law but originated in the Lieber Code published in 1863 by the U.S. Government. By following the development of the prohibition and other restrictions on the methods of combat, it identifies an overlap with treaty restrictions on perfidy but also that modern allusions to enemies as outlaws ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ continue in some concerning ways
Andrew Fine, The Price of Truth: The Journalist who Defied Military Censors to Report the Fall of Nazi Germany
Get PDFBook Review: Contemporary Practice in Studio Art Therapy.
Get PDF‘…it is very hard to root in a constantly shifting world. In the studio we tap into a primal source, asking not only ‘who are we?’ but also and more insistently ‘how can we be “at home” in movement’ Kapitan (p.56).
Here is a fine manifesto for the re-evaluation of studio art therapy, what defines it, its history, its significance, its variance with more clinical or psychoanalytic approaches, which for many art therapists has for some time been pre-eminent, and its future. This perspective is highlighted by Dalley in the forward when she says this book revisits ‘the healing power of art as a foundation of art therapy practice’
While a studio might be thought of as a dedicated ‘art-making’ space, somewhat set apart from the ordinary demands of daily life, editors Brown, C. & Omand H. point out in their introduction that this reflects a rather privileged European and North American idea of art, rather than understanding it as ‘being embedded in communal craft activities, architecture, or religious practices for example’
Hamlet and Decadent Reimagination
Get PDFThe decadents and Aesthetes of the fin de siècle exhibit a distinct penchant for incorporating diverse artistic works into their idiosyncratic aesthetic universe, including those which may appear alien to the decadent ethos. This process facilitates transformative and provocative new understandings of the original texts. Two exemplary cases of this practice can be observed in the treatment of the classical poet Sappho and of the biblical princess Salomé as they are rendered in decadent literary works. Nicole Albert credits Charles Baudelaire with sparking the nineteenth century rediscovery of Sappho with his references to the poet in Les fleurs du mal (1857), further popularized in English thereafter by his disciple, Algernon Charles Swinburne. The decadent caricature of Sappho reduces her to a vessel of transgressive sexuality, effectively disregarding any notion of biographical fidelity to the poet or her extant literary legacy. Petra Dierkes-Thrun tracks the evolution of Salomé’s representation in the same period, and a pattern becomes discernible in the decadent treatment of canonical figures. The early works of decadents and Symbolists transform the New Testament narrative ‘into a lurid tale of dangerous female sexuality and cunning, physical passion, and pathological perversity’, setting the stage for the character’s metamorphosis in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play. The obedient daughter of the biblical story becomes the apotheosis of the decadent femme fatale.