Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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‘They got it all wrong!’ – Victorian War Fiction and the First World War
Get PDFBeginning with George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, invasion novels became a regular feature of late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. The article takes a closer look at the depiction of war in these texts from a military history point of view; it argues that they were not so far from reality as to render them useless to the military historian. Rather, they can be used to provide insights into how the authors and their audience thought about the great war that many expected to come within their lifetime
Some Americans in the ‘House Beautiful’: Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Aestheticism
No full textThe ‘House Beautiful’ of the Aesthetic movement was an ideal of beauty, sensuality, and taste. A reaction against industrialization, Aestheticism embraced internationalism and was frequently condemned as immoral. During his 1882 lecture tour of America, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) became the Aesthetic movement’s most recognizable spokesman. The writer Edith Wharton (1863-1937) may have heard him speak, which is significant because her first published book was an interior design manual, The Decoration of Houses (1897). This is just one point within a vibrant transatlantic exchange of ideas on truth and beauty in art and design in the 1870s-80s. Familiar with life on both sides of the Atlantic from travels in her childhood, Edith Jones had been enchanted by the art and architecture of the ‘Old World’, and her literary career began with a serious engagement with art, interior design, and their importance in society. Both Wilde and Wharton put their theories of decoration into practice in their own, very different, homes. Although Wharton’s controlled taste seems diametrically opposed to Wilde’s espoused decadence, it is possible that Aestheticism gave Wharton a language with which to discuss beauty in her own writing. At several points in her career, she utilized the ideas of Walter Pater (1839-1894) in her work: a youthful poem ‘Intense Love’s Utterance’ (1881), the short story ‘The Fulness of Life’ (1893), and her last, unfinished novel, The Buccaneers (1938). Each would have been unthinkable without the transatlantic exchange of ideas on Aestheticism, of which Wilde was the self-acknowledged prophet
Arrangements in White and Red
Get PDF‘Arrangements in White and Red’ reflects on the relationship between Joanna Hiffernan (1839-1886) and James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) in the 1860s, a relationship that produced two of the most significant paintings of the era: Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (1861-63) and Symphony in White No. 2: The Little White Girl (1864). Hiffernan’s contribution to Whistler’s work has undergone a major reassessment in recent years as feminist art scholarship has reappraised the role of the model in the creation of the artwork, bringing to wider attention the physical and aesthetic labour of women (and sometimes men) previously given the romanticized epithet of ‘muse’. In 2022, the Royal Academy of Arts London and National Gallery of Art Washington staged an exhibition that, for the first time, put a spotlight on Hiffernan’s role. Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan brought together the overwhelming majority of surviving art associated with the model and showed clearly for the first time the full extent of her contribution to nineteenth-century visual culture. In particular, Margaret F. MacDonald’s research, published in the book that accompanied the exhibition, uncovered new facts about her life and dispelled a number of myths
The Yellow Art Piece
No full textWhat you are looking at here is The Yellow Art Piece, created for this issue of Volupté. The title is the only true statement I feel the piece needs from me as the artist, as it will surely resonate with the readers of this journal and others familiar with the 1890s. To the rest of its viewers, otherwise unfamiliar with the milieu it turns to, it is merely a work of art in yellow, black, and gold. Works of art only take on meaning if seen. It is, thus, the familiarity and knowledge of the viewer that lends meaning to the work
Park Young-hee, ‘A Ward Woven with Moonlight’ (1923): A Translation with an Overview of Korean Decadence
Get PDFAlthough decadence was predominantly focused on Western Europe, particularly France and Britain, its influence reached as far as the Korean peninsula, during the early twentieth century when the nation was under Japanese rule. Regrettably, this facet of global decadence has been somewhat neglected within the realm of academia until now.
During the mid-Victorian period and onwards, the exchange of cultures facilitated a significant influence of Japanese art on European artists, who developed a strong affinity for the opulence of ‘Oriental’ aesthetics, commonly known as Japonisme. Simultaneously, Japan actively pursued westernization throughout the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taisho (1912-1926) eras, embracing and emulating various aspects of Western culture. Unsurprisingly, academic discussion in the English language on decadence in East Asia, or ‘Oriental’ motifs in decadence, has predominantly examined Japan’s literature and art, resulting in a substantial body of academic work in this field since the 1960s.[i]
[i] Such as Imura Kimie, \u27日本におけるオスカー・ワイルド--移入期-1-’ [‘Nippon Ni Okeru Oscar Wilde: I’nyuki (Dai Ichibu)’], Tsurumi Joshidaigaku Kiyō 鶴見女子大学紀要, 7 (1969), 39-60). Qi Chen, ‘The Circulation of Oscar Wilde’s Prose and Poems in Japan (1868–1926)’, Literature Compass, 10.3 (2013), 288-99. Yoko Hirata, ‘Oscar Wilde and Honma Hisao, the First Translator of “De Profundis” into Japanese’, Japan Review, 21 (2009), 241-66. Joseph Lavery, ‘Remote Proximities: Aesthetics, Orientalism, and the Intimate Life of Japanese Objects’, ELH, 83.4 (2016), 1159-83
Keeping the Occupiers Occupied: Leisure and Tourism in the British Rhine Army, 1918-1929
Get PDFAfter the ordeals of the First World War, the military occupation of the Rhineland offered members of the British Army unprecedented opportunities for travel and amusement. Posted to a region popular with British tourists before 1914, the British occupiers were encouraged, particularly by the English-language Cologne Post, to make the most of their time on the ‘Romantic Rhine’, even though the Army wished to limit their interactions with the German population. This article examines how travel and tourism, and particularly walking excursions, were promoted in the Rhine Army as healthy, educational alternatives to the perceived dangers of fraternisation and especially of city life in Cologne
Irish Regiments and Soldiers in the Crimean War – their contribution and legacy
Get PDFDuring the Crimean War (1853-6), five Irish regiments served with the British expeditionary force, while thousands of Irish soldiers served across the British Army in non-Irish regiments. These Irish troops made a significant contribution, and the war was followed with considerable interest in Ireland, encouraging civilians to volunteer to serve as doctors, nurses, and engineers. This article will outline the context of this Irish involvement in the Crimean War and the level of public interest, while also referring to the survival of an awareness of that war in Irish folk memory until well into the twentieth century
Decadence and Aestheticism through Fashion and Textiles: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Get PDFThe description of Basil Hallward’s studio – provided in the opening lines of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – is a feast for the senses from the start, with the ‘rich odour of roses’ inviting the reader through the door, away from the ‘dim roar of London’ to the orientalist fantasy within. As in so many fin de siècle visual and literary texts, decadence is conveyed – or implied – through vivid descriptions of the material culture surrounding, or, as in this instance, carefully assembled by the central characters. At the heart of his description are ‘long tussore-silk curtains’ on which the ‘fantastic shadows of birds of flight’ produce ‘a kind of momentary Japanese effect’, an exotic invocation of the Asian-inspired Aestheticism to which Wilde subscribed in his own life. He was perhaps the most well-known male proponent of Aesthetic Dress – most obviously performed through velvet suits with knickerbocker trousers he famously wore during his 1882 lecture tour of North America, where he was photographed by Napoléon Saron