Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Writing for Publication in Art Therapy: Reflections on an ATOL Workshop
Get PDF“Do you feel there is something you would like to say? Do you have an idea but are unsure how to write about it? Clinical work stimulates ideas, which may or may not be shared with others, and the thought of going public may feel scary. Few of us are born writers but all it takes is a bit of know-how and some practice. This workshop is designed to help you focus your thinking, approach the task of writing with confidence, and to explain the process of publishing. It will be held at a private address and places will be limited to 6 participants on a first come basis.” – ATOL Workshop publicity statement
Writing Art Therapy. ATOL One-day conference, October 2018
No full textWriting Art Therapy. ATOL One-day conference, October 201
‘Vers le sabbat’: Occult Initiation and Non-Normative Masculinity in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901)
Get PDFAlthough Lorrain has fallen into obscurity in recent years, much like Decadence itself, ‘inferior to the canon from which it has fallen away’, the connections between homosexuality and transgression have generated much discussion by critics of Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas, with most agreeing that the author provides us with a homosexual discourse. This article aims not only to reclaim a non-canonical author and text, but to address also the dearth of attention paid to occult overtones that run parallel to the narrative of male homosexuality in the novel, which subvert the traditional (misogynistic) assumption of witchcraft in particular as an exclusively female ‘crime’. I will focus on what I identify as the apex of the narrative – the Witches’ Sabbat – arguing that the representation of witchcraft tropes in the novel links to the presentation of non-normative masculinity through comparable engagement with marginal practices
The Poison of Literature: On the Social and Literary Construction of Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s ‘Black Masses’ Scandal
Get PDFIn Le Canard sauvage, 1903, Alfred Jarry states that ‘après tout, c’est la littérature qui prédestine les noms, même s’ils sont déjà historiques, et qui dicte ses conditions à la vie’ [after all, it is literature that predestines names, even if they are already historic, and which imposes its conditions upon life]. This statement was made in the wake of the ‘Black Masses’ scandal that broke in the press during the summer of 1903. Two young men – Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen and Count Hamelin de Warren – were arrested on the charge of being involved in a moral scandal that was rumoured to include underage boys at orgiastic ‘ceremonies’ inspired by Nero and Elagabalus, held twice a week in Adelswärd-Fersen’s flat, in Paris’ beaux quartiers.
Missed Signals? A reply to Mike Bullock and Laurence A. Lyons
Get PDFThis response to Mike Bullock and Laurence A. Lyons’ recent debate article on British wireless communication in the First World War makes use of new and under-utilised archival sources in order to counter their claim that the British high command failed to modernise its communications system when it could have done so. Taking issue with their argument and methodology, which oversimplifies the nature of the communication difficulties experienced by the armies of the era and distorts our understanding of the complexities of the British army’s communications system, the article contributes to the ongoing academic re-evaluation of the British army’s ability to adapt and innovate during the war
Book Review. Art Therapy across Cultural and Race Boundaries: Working with Identity. By Lorette Dye
No full textThere is very little in Art Therapy that tackles the difficulties of working cross-culturally and with issues of race; in this respect this book is to be welcomed. It is a practical book rather than a theoretical one, and as such, is the first of its kind in this subject area that I know of. The author, Lorette Dye, clearly has a wealth of experience working with people who come from different cultural groups than her own, mainly in various countries in Africa, and in the USA, and the lessons she has learnt from this form the first section.
Vernon Lee’s Occult Beauty
Get PDFThroughout her career, the late-Victorian essayist, fiction writer, and aesthetic theorist Vernon Lee (1856-1935) sustained a critique of the Aesthetic movement to which she was nevertheless an important contributor. Finding that the doctrine ofl’art pour l’artsanctioned elitist self-absorption, irresponsible excess and intellectual vapidity, Lee sought to instead establish a connection between the worship of beauty and the development of ethics. One of the ways in which she achieved this divergent aestheticist project was, I wish to suggest, through occult theories of knowledge, learning, renunciation, and submission. My aim in this article is to approach the concept of beauty in Lee’s work, considering how it energizes and challenges her interwoven concepts of desire, history, and ethics. Turning first to the occult underpinnings of her essays on aesthetics, I subsequently unearth the queer historiographical injunction embedded within her Gothic fiction, exploring, through a reading of ‘Amour Dure’, how the historian’s encounter with occult beauty awakens affective and sexual investments in the feminist past.
Review: Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Get PDFAs the author of two other monographs involving the Victorian sensory imagination, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester University Press, 2001) and Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester University Press, 2008), Catherine Maxwell brings her vast historical knowledge of literary figures of the Victorian period to her latest study, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture.Scents and Sensibility is a work of literary history peppered with analysis of scent-related texts. Maxwell reads many of these texts as demonstrating a given author’s idiosyncratic tastes but also as revealing deeper connections to cultural mores and metaphors. These connections, in turn, blossom into fuller readings of the texts themselves as we better understand them in their cultural contexts. The main organizing principle of this study, therefore, is a focus on the authors, whom Maxwell identifies as olfactifs, those particularly sensitive to odours as an indicator of their Decadent aesthetic credentials.
Occultism and the homme fatal in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy
Get PDFDecadent literature is often characterized by lives lived at the fringes of convention. While the intersections between Victorian literature and the supernatural in its various forms have been the topic of considerable discussion, the presence and function of occultism in Decadent literature remain relatively underexplored. In contrast, occultism’s contribution to modernist literature and culture has received continued attention, most recently in John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult(2015) and in Tessel M. Baudin and Henrik Johnsson’s collection, The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema(2018). The existing lacuna in Decadence Studies is particularly surprising given that Decadent literature, with its noted focus on the strange and the curious, lends itself to such critical scrutiny. This essay is the first to examine how the homme fatal– a key Decadent trope notoriously explored in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890-91) – sits at the intersections between Decadence, occultism, and homoerotic desire in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy(1897). Here I argue that, though Hichens is best known for The Green Carnation(1894), the homosocial and homoerotic triangulations of desire in Hichens’s Flamesimply that Wilde’s novel had a far more serious impact on Hichens’s writing than his scandalous parody might suggest.
Bloody April Revisited: The Royal Flying Corps at the Battle of Arras, 1917
Get PDFThe Battle of Arras, 1917 is generally considered a land battle where aircraft played minor roles in scouting and counter-battery work. Meanwhile, a parallel but separate air battle known as “Bloody April” was waged overhead where German pilots, enjoying significant technical and geographic advantages, inflicted very high losses on the British and French flying services. In reality, the ground and air battles were inextricably linked. The Royal Flying Corps under Major-General Hugh Trenchard made great strides towards the development of a modern air campaign. Local and distant bombing raids and air superiority missions made it possible for near continuous reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and contact patrol flights providing invaluable support to the ground forces. As a result, the RFC made a significant contribution to the outcome of the Battle of Arras though there were major problems with this nascent air campaign. Nevertheless, it was an integral step in the development of air power in the First World War