Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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The End of Great Periods: Late Ottoman Decadent Poetry and the End of the Ottoman Empire
Get PDFThis article examines late Ottoman Decadence through the 1910 Fecr-i Atı [Dawn of the Future] manifesto and the literary criticism of its most famous signatory, Ahmet Haşim (1887-1933). Through this case study, I explore what Kristin Mahoney has called the ‘political utility of decadence’ within the Ottoman-Turkish sphere. Haşim’s writing across the Ottoman Empire-Turkish Republic divide illustrates the ways in which the aesthetic practices and linguistic register of Ottoman poetry were increasingly understood in the final decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as displaying the markers of literary greatness from a previous social order, ones which impeded the development of a uniquely Turkish national literature. In other words, for certain literary critics, deploying the aesthetic practices of Ottoman poetry became linked to a specifically Ottoman imperial decline and, consequently, also became shorthand for implying the connection between certain aesthetic practices and Turkey’s political progress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
An Irish Catholic Amateur Military Tradition in the British Army? The Irish Militia, 1793-1908
Get PDFBoth an Irish military tradition and an amateur military tradition have been explored in the historiography involving the study of British Army as they relate to forces recruited and serving in Ireland over two centuries. This article will take this exploration further by arguing that it is possible to demonstrate that an Irish Catholic amateur military tradition existed in the Irish Militia, as established in 1793, and existing until the turn of the twentieth century. This Irish Catholic tradition fed into these two broader traditions, becoming integral parts of them, while also exerting Irish identity in its own ways
Preface
Get PDFAlmost ten years ago, in 2014, Goldsmiths organized a conference entitled ‘Decadence and the Senses’, which aimed to explore the decadent sensorium and its representation in literature and visual culture from classical to modern times. Decadent studies was an emerging field then, defining itself principally around literary studies, but a number of the conference papers were richly interdisciplinary. One such paper was Liz Renes’ on John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting Madame X and the ‘aesthetics of sculptural corporeality’. She tantalized us with a discussion of how the decadent aesthetics of clothes and cosmetics disrupted Victorian conventions. Since then, however, despite the provocations of the 2014 conference and with the exception of a few interventions (including most recently Catherine Spooner’s essay on ‘Fashion: Decadent Stylings’ in the Oxford Handbook of Decadence), the worlds of decadence studies and fashion have seldom collided. It is with enormous and long-awaited pleasure therefore that Volupté is the platform for a selection of new critical and creative explorations on decadence, aestheticism, fashion, textiles, accessories, and cosmetics
Review: Decadence, Now, Malta Society of Arts, Palazzo De La Salle, Valletta, 11-31 May 2023
Get PDFMoving through and beyond the fin de siècle, Decadence, Now was comprised of a multidimensional display of artistic works, paraphernalia, artefacts from museums, galleries and private collections, and contemporary art. This was accompanied by musical performances in the fashion of salon gatherings, featuring songs and operatic extracts from Italy, Germany, and France, as well as the premiere of a song cycle by Karl Fiorini, composed in response to the music of the Belle Époque. Curated by Andrew Borg Wirth and featuring art by Luke Azzopardi, Andrew Borg Wirth, Maria Theuma, Michael Zerafa, and Rebecca Bonaci, the exhibition considered ‘decadence’ as a unifier of numerous artefacts across a breadth of styles, epochs, and subject matter, while foregrounding the curatorial process as an artistic manoeuvre in its own right
Review: Kristin Mahoney, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Get PDFAmong Richard Bruce Nugent’s papers in the Beinecke Library, there are multiple manuscripts of a story about a half-Japanese, half-American gender-fluid individual who works as a geisha, has a sexual relationship with their father (first accidentally and then by conscious choice), and travels around Europe and North America in pursuit of physical pleasure and beautiful objects to collect. ‘Geisha Man’ never saw the light of day during Nugent’s lifetime. But the author’s daring plan for this decadent story was to bring it out as an impossibly elaborate art book, in which each page should have been printed on paper of a different colour, with different-coloured ink. The intriguing ‘Geisha Man’ is emblematic of the decadent corpus that Kristin Mahoney brings to light in her fascinating new book, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. It is a corpus that is, like Nugent’s story, made of cosmopolitan connections and projections, attempts to fashion and unmake complex racial and gender identities, baffling hybrids of aestheticism and taboo
Re-purposing gun based anti-aircraft systems
Get PDFBetween the late 1960s and mid-1990s, American ground forces employed the Vulcan Air Defence System (VADS), for use against short range, aerial and ground targets. The VADS was mobile and comprised a radar and a six barrelled 20 mm autocannon, but this was soon found to be ineffective against fast aircraft at low altitudes. Despite being an old technology by 1982 an Israeli VADS downed a fighter jet and this is believed to be the only time in VADS operational history. This happened during the 1982 Israel – Lebanon war in the midst of intense ground combat and where the VADS helped unexpectedly. That event, the VADS withdrawal from operations in the 1990s, and their recent reappearance in use against drones are discussed
Andrew Wheale, Ham & Jam: 6th Airborne Division in Normandy – Generating Combat Effectiveness: November 1942-September 1944
Get PDFLying Down or Standing Up for Music: Hearing and Listening in Vernon Lee’s Music and its Lovers
Get PDFMy childhood experience of learning musical instruments was characterized by severity. Formal, impersonal teachers and a limited repertoire were the norm in 1970s and ’80s music teaching, based, as it was, on passing the Associated Board exams. Frivolity was not encouraged, for I was meant to be producing what was then (and is now, to an extent) called ‘serious’ music.
‘Seriousness’ began with the body. When playing the piano one was told to sit upright, to be attentive to the music and to hold oneself throughout a performance with a posture that paid a certain homage. The standard manuals for learning the piano in those days, Dame Fanny Waterman and Marian Harewood’s three-volume series Piano Lessons, gave posture a moral imperative. An illustration at the beginning of the first book showed three different pianists. The first was hunched and looking at his fingers on the keyboard. ‘This is a bad pupil’, said a caption. The second sat erect. ‘This is a good pupil’, said another. The third, however, was said to be a ‘great pianist’. With an outwardly curved back and dramatically-held fingers as if submitting to but also commanding the music like a magician, this pianist was at one with his art. This practical but moral necessity was also applied to my other instruments, including the violin and the bassoon. Granted it is hard to hunch with the latter, but the bassoon’s almost comically prodigious appearance, which suggests far more than it ever seems to give, always had to be transcended through the seriousness with which one related to and clutched the instrument
Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady
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Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady (Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst, 2022) is a 72-page hard-cover graphic novel, and is an adaptation of Vernon Lee’s short story ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, first published in volume 10 of The Yellow Book (July 1896). This short story was Lee’s only contribution to the magazine and utilizes gothic and decadent themes, such as possession, mythology, and the femme fatale in order to explore societal pressures, marginalization, and gender politics.
 
Review: Mathilde Blind, Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose, ed. by James Diedrick (Cambridge: MHRA, 2021)
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Mathilde Blind’s writings, lectures, and intellectual interests make her a decadent and New Woman figure of the fin de siècle. Born in Mannheim, she was exiled from Germany, France, and Belgium after her stepfather Karl Blind took part in the Baden Revolution; the family settled in London, where they received visits from Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and others. She wrote poems that criticized both the sexism of Darwinian sexual selection and the trope of the fallen woman, published in the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Dark Blue, and formed friendships with Amy Levy, Vernon Lee, Arthur Symons, Mona Caird, and other late nineteenth-century writers. Her corpus includes not only a wide range of poems – among them epic poems, dramatic monologues, and ballads – but also lectures, critical reviews, biographies, translations, and a novel