Editor's preface.
The title of the present volume, From Decadent to Modernist: and Other Essays, reflects the fact that twelve of the fourteen essays in the collection have clustered within the period 1880-1939, while the remaining two provide a kind of coda to the foregoing by dealing with recent and contemporary literature. The decadence--that rich literary phenomenon that causes English writers to reach for French phrases (fin de siecle, fin du globe, Symbolistes) and to treat as touchstones French language texts such as J. K. Huysmans's notorious A Rebours--is explored or touched on in several of the essays here. Nicholas Shrimpton helpfully counterpoints these French usages by reminding us that a solid English word, Pessimism, goes to the core of English decadent writing, while Marion Thain enlists a nuanced French term, homage, to express the responses of Woolf, Joyce, and others to their decadent precursors. Catherine Maxwell's serious and discriminating study of Aylwin, Theodore Watts-Dunton's best-selling novel of the 1890s, brings into view a writer who is often thought of primarily as the companion (or custodian) who took charge of Swinburne for the latter part of the poet's life. Richard Pearson's study of Wells sees this prolific and extraordinary artist within the historical contexts of developments in anthropology and sociology at the end of the Victorian age; the two essays on Henry James (by John Harvey and Denis Flannery) illuminate contrasting aspects of this great writer's work in the light of the 'recent wave of fiction wrapped up in Henry James', as Denis Flannery phrases it. Another major American novelist, Edith Wharton, is the subject of a searching collaborative essay on Wharton and 'the Gothic', by Janet Beer and Avril Horner. A completely fresh view of Woolf and Forster is offered by Wendy Faris in her account of 'Bloomsbury's Beasts', while Woolf 's political engagements and convictions are explored in depth by Ruth Livesey in 'Socialism in Bloomsbury'. Mary Elizabeth Coleridge and Olive Custance are relatively neglected writers given welcome attention here by Alison Chapman and Patricia Pulham, respectively; and Pablo Mukherjee takes the volume beyond the endpoint of 'Modernism' with a challenging new essay on V. S. Naipaul. The volume also has two strikingly original essays on churches: Matthew Bradley's 'Churches for Art's Sake' asserts that within the aesthetic movement and in Eliot's poetry churches raise 'important questions about the autonomy of art', while Colin Hutchinson's essay studies 'the abandoned church' within the work of a group of contemporary British novelists. I am grateful to all of these scholars for their contributions to this new issue of The Yearbook of English Studies.J. B.
Future volumes of the Yearbook will include themed volumes on Science Fiction and Tudor Literature. YES appears as two volumes annually, and these titles will be published in the course of 2007-8.
Correspondence related to the Yearbook should be addressed to:
Professor John Batchelor
Editor, Yearbook of English Studies
School of English
Newcastle University
Newcastle
NE1 7RU
Email: [email protected]
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| Title Annotation: | From Decadent to Modernist: And Other Essays |
|---|---|
| Author: | Batchelor, John |
| Publication: | Yearbook of English Studies |
| Article Type: | Editorial |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2007 |
| Words: | 497 |
| Previous Article: | Theodore Watts-Dunton's Aylwin (1898) and the reduplications of Romanticism. |
| Next Article: | Modernist homage to the fin de siecle. |