Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Wendell Schollander, The Glory of the Empires, 1880-1914: The Illustrated History of the Military Uniforms and Traditions of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States
Get PDFHans Schäufler (trans. Tony Le Tissier), Panzers on the Vistula: Retreat and Rout in East Prussia 1945
Get PDFThe Journal as Archive: Vesy and the Russian Reader’s Encounter with Decadence
Get PDFThe journal Vesy [Libra], published in Moscow between 1904 and 1909, offered a markedly new venue for the waves of modernist authors and theorists emerging in turn-of-the-century Russia. It incorporated numerous nods to European literary trends and included regular contributions from Remy de Gourmont, frequent articles on Oscar Wilde, reproductions of artwork by Odilon Redon and Aubrey Beardsley, and a steady stream of reviews of recent books in French, English, German, and Italian. Yet it also published new works by the most prominent Russian Symbolists and decadents. Vesy’s aesthetic stance was abundantly clear to its readers, prompting a hostile critic to label it ‘the Koran of the Moscow Decadents’. This offhand dismissal contains a surprising degree of insight. The journal billed itself as a ‘bibliographical monthly’ that sought to combine Russian and Western, new and old, original and translation. True to the journal’s bibliographical identity, the mixture of materials included in the seventy-two issues of Vesy did indeed read like another breviary of decadence that collected the foundational tenets of the new tradition, accumulated over several decades from all corners of Europe, into a single space of publication. For Russian readers and authors, decadence was a balancing act. On the one hand, they sought to imitate authors and texts of the past that were imported with a badge of decadence that had already been established by European critics and readers, and on the other, they were simultaneously generating distinctly Russian iterations of what, for them, was an emerging modernist art form. Having created an instant, serialized, and widely accessible archive of decadent works, Vesy offers a curious indication of how decadence was read from a distance while also working as a template for transplanting it into new cultural spaces. This perspective helps flesh out a definition of decadence that highlights its open-endedness and malleability.
 
Review: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Romans et nouvelles (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 2019) & Œuvres complètes, vols. I & VI (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017 & 2019)
Get PDFFor many general readers of French literature the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, who began his writing career by allying himself to Émile Zola’s naturalist movement and ended it as a mystical Catholic, remains a minority interest, intriguing in parts, certainly, but subsidiary both to the traditional literary canon, and to the contemporary currents of academic discourse. Nevertheless, there has been something of a revival in Huysmans’s literary fortunes over the last few years: in 2017 Classiques Garnier published the first volume of an ambitious nine-volume Œuvres complètes, which will incorporate practically all of Huysmans’s published and unpublished works; a major exhibition devoted to Huysmans as an art critic ran from 3 April to 19 July at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris; and now the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, whose editions have long been seen as marking a writer’s entry into the French literary pantheon, has finally inaugurated Huysmans into their iconic leather-bound series. It would be an over-simplification to say that all this is the result of Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission [Submission], the narrator of which is a Huysmans specialist at the Sorbonne who is offered the editorship of a proposed Pléiade edition, but the lively debate aroused by the novel certainly had the effect of introducing Huysmans to a new readership. When asked about the Pléiade’s long-overdue decision to include Huysmans, André Guyaux, who, together with the critic Pierre Jourde, directed the editorial team responsible for the edition, admitted: ‘L’idée était dans l’air, mais Houellebecq y a incontestablement contribué.’ [The idea was in the air, but Houellebecq undoubtedly contributed to it.
Fear the Turk or Call on the Turk? Conflicting Emotions in Renaissance Italy
Get PDFIt is well known that after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Renaissance Italy was consumed by its fear of the Turk. This article will demonstrate that throughout the Renaissance the Turks were also associated with a set of positive emotions: hope in a system of justice that Christian authorities no longer seemed to ensure; a desire for vengeance against the untouchable ruling elite; the expectation of social, moral and even religious renewal. Historical memory has been pruned of these positive associations but it is important to keep in mind this ambivalent emotional conflict which tore apart all levels of society and broke up societal groups to the point of shaping them as much as the hostilities did
As if from another country
Get PDFThis article is written in response to an invitation, issued to members of the consortium that established ATOL ten years ago, to reflect on their professional and ATOL-related preoccupations over this period of time. The author describes the last phase of her working life which saw her take an unexpected turn into university management, followed by another seismic shift into retirement and a welcome re-turn to her art practice
Housing the Oscar Wilde Archive: Postmodernism’s Curation of Decadence
Get PDFSince his death, Oscar Wilde has only been accessible through documents: those he left behind, and the documents produced by friends, family, scholars, biographers, and artists. The figure we know is related to the historical original, but it is not Wilde himself. It is a Wilde born of the archive, created by the mingling of documentary evidence with archival decision-making, critical intervention, and creative imagination. Reading Wilde as an archive, then, has implications for both decadence and recent postmodern approaches to archive theory.
This article is based on ongoing research into the relationship between decadence and postmodernism. The figure of Wilde is important, not because of anachronistic claims that Wilde is a proto-postmodernist, but because he offers an important example of the interests in history and the archive shared by decadence and postmodernism. While resisting the notion of any equivalence between postmodernism and decadence, we argue that these literary and artistic movements, separated by nearly a century, nonetheless share similar interests in disrupting notions of progress, linear history, and the objectivity of the archive.
 
‘Struggling with the tempter’: the Queer Archival Spaces of Vernon Lee, Mary Robinson, and Amy Levy
Get PDFBurdett Gardner was the first scholar to gain access to the personal correspondence of Vernon Lee (1856-1935) after its donation to Colby College, Maine, in 1951. Yet his resulting monograph, The Lesbian Imagination (Victorian Style): A Psychological and Critical Study of Vernon Lee, was not published until 1987. This may have been due to the embargo Lee herself had placed upon the bequest, though her close friend and executor Irene Cooper Willis had published a collection of Lee’s private correspondence in 1937 and provided permission for the scholar Peter Gunn to write and publish a biography of Lee in 1964. Gunn addresses the embargo in his preface by suggesting that adherence to Lee’s testamentary wishes would impoverish her ‘extraordinarily precocious talents’. Therefore, he notes, Cooper Willis waived the prohibition in this instance. Why then was Gunn’s biography published with permission of the testamentary estate, and Gardner’s monograph subject to Lee’s proviso? I would argue that this was due to the ways in which each writer engaged with a particular aspect of interest in Lee’s archival remains: her sexuality
Review: Maxime Foerster, The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2018)
Get PDFPublished in a series that aims to explore the historical developments that inform our concepts of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic, Maxime Foerster’s exploration of The Politics of Love: Queer Heterosexuality in Nineteenth-Century French Literature arrives at a perfect time in the post-#MeToo society in which we find ourselves. Queer theory increasingly allows us to interrogate even the most monolithic of sexual realities, many of which find their basis in the French nineteenth century. Indeed, despite recent French misgivings surrounding the rise of la théorie du genre, it is important to remember that both our conceptions of gender and sexuality and the deconstructions of them are equally (and ironically) informed by French thought