This article examines the work of three British writers – Arthur Symons, James Elroy Flecker, and Harold Nicolson – who all spent time in Constantinople in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on the Decadent literary aesthetic, they registered their distaste for a city then synonymous with decline. In their poetry, impressionistic prose, and fiction they struggle to write about a city that seemed so amenable to a literature of exhaustion and decay. I argue that the work of Symons and Flecker reveals something like a limit point to the development of literary Decadence. Rather than be a vehicle for affective, cosmopolitan community, Decadence encouraged solipsism and melancholy, a legacy that lives on in literary modernism. Their exhausted Decadence is then satirised by Nicolson who sees late-Victorian aestheticism as ill-equipped to deal with the geopolitical complexities of the city by the Bosphorus.
这篇文章考察了三位英国作家的作品 – Arthur Symons、James Elroy Flecker和Harold Nicolson – 他们在二十世纪的前二十年都在君士坦丁堡度过了一段时间。他们借鉴了颓废派的文学美学,表达了他们对一个当时是衰落代名词的城市的厌恶。在他们的诗歌、印象派散文和小说中,他们努力写一个似乎很容易被疲惫和腐朽的文学所征服的城市。我认为西蒙斯和弗莱克的作品揭示了文学颓废发展的一个极限点。Decadence并没有成为情感世界共同体的载体,而是鼓励唯我主义和忧郁,这是文学现代主义的遗产。尼科尔森讽刺了他们疲惫的颓废,他认为维多利亚晚期的唯美主义没有能力应对博斯普鲁斯海峡城市的地缘政治复杂性。
{"title":"Decadent Constantinople: Symons, Flecker, and Nicolson","authors":"A. Murray","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0490","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the work of three British writers – Arthur Symons, James Elroy Flecker, and Harold Nicolson – who all spent time in Constantinople in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on the Decadent literary aesthetic, they registered their distaste for a city then synonymous with decline. In their poetry, impressionistic prose, and fiction they struggle to write about a city that seemed so amenable to a literature of exhaustion and decay. I argue that the work of Symons and Flecker reveals something like a limit point to the development of literary Decadence. Rather than be a vehicle for affective, cosmopolitan community, Decadence encouraged solipsism and melancholy, a legacy that lives on in literary modernism. Their exhausted Decadence is then satirised by Nicolson who sees late-Victorian aestheticism as ill-equipped to deal with the geopolitical complexities of the city by the Bosphorus.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43061626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sarah E. Maier and Brenda Ayres, Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past","authors":"Nicola Bandler-Llewellyn","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0498","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0498","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41466985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since his first appearances in print, Sherlock Holmes has served as literature’s resident genius. But what does ‘genius’ mean in a world that increasingly conceptualises intelligence as a quantifiable and measurable phenomenon? This essay considers the characterisation of Holmes’s intelligence in the context of a revolution in the way human intelligence is understood – a revolution instigated by Francis Galton’s 1869 Hereditary Genius and emblematised by the invention of the IQ test in 1905. This historical context situates Holmes’s character at the crux of a shift in the conception of intelligence, as encapsulating a moment of cultural wavering between ‘genius’ as a mysterious quality or gift, and ‘genius’ as a higher-than-average number on a scale. Ultimately, this essay suggests that these competing models of the characterisation of intelligence in the Holmes stories illuminate a fundamental clash between the novelistic ideal of portraying incommensurable individuality on the one hand, and the de-individualising trend of the IQ model of intelligence on the other.
{"title":"‘Magnificent Intellect’: Character, Intelligence, and Genius in Sherlock Holmes","authors":"Naomi Michalowicz","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0493","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0493","url":null,"abstract":"Since his first appearances in print, Sherlock Holmes has served as literature’s resident genius. But what does ‘genius’ mean in a world that increasingly conceptualises intelligence as a quantifiable and measurable phenomenon? This essay considers the characterisation of Holmes’s intelligence in the context of a revolution in the way human intelligence is understood – a revolution instigated by Francis Galton’s 1869 Hereditary Genius and emblematised by the invention of the IQ test in 1905. This historical context situates Holmes’s character at the crux of a shift in the conception of intelligence, as encapsulating a moment of cultural wavering between ‘genius’ as a mysterious quality or gift, and ‘genius’ as a higher-than-average number on a scale. Ultimately, this essay suggests that these competing models of the characterisation of intelligence in the Holmes stories illuminate a fundamental clash between the novelistic ideal of portraying incommensurable individuality on the one hand, and the de-individualising trend of the IQ model of intelligence on the other.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41635214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies and highlights the factors shaping the theme of transgression and the manner in which transgression plays out within the larger context of deathlessness. In the concluding segments, the paper also explores the manner in which transgression prompts the dehumanisation of the deathless.
{"title":"Negotiating Transgression, Deathlessness, and Senescence in Mary Shelley's ‘The Mortal Immortal’","authors":"Devaleena Kundu","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0491","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts to study deathlessness in relation to notions of physical and moral transgression. Through a close textual analysis of Mary Shelley's work, ‘The Mortal Immortal’, the article undertakes an enquiry into the discomforts of arrested immortality. It argues that by turning an otherwise normative body corporeally interstitial, deathlessness prompts a narrative of transgression. The focus is on the protagonist, Winzy, and the impact deathlessness has on both his personal and social relations. I utilise theories of transgression, linking them to concepts of physical impurity and corruption to examine how deathlessness dehumanises the individual, rendering them a potential threat to social stability. Keeping corporeal transgression as its focal point, I also elucidate how deathlessness-generated-corporeal interstitiality can problematise sexuality. Deathlessness, therefore, is analysed in terms of multiple transgressions synthesised into one. The article identifies and highlights the factors shaping the theme of transgression and the manner in which transgression plays out within the larger context of deathlessness. In the concluding segments, the paper also explores the manner in which transgression prompts the dehumanisation of the deathless.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42957600","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration","authors":"Gabrielle Stecher","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0496","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48075548","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Since the publication of Rudyard Kipling's (1865–1936) Kim (1901), most critics have agreed that the novel falls into the genre of colonial fiction. But they are divided into two groups – defenders and detractors – regarding Kipling's treatment of religions in the novel. The defenders celebrate his accomplishment and sympathy in depicting the devotion and attraction of the Victorian Era towards Buddhism. On the other hand, the detractors blame Kipling for fictionalising the confrontation between pragmatic Western rationality and Eastern mystical irrationality. Against this backdrop, this article revisits the novel with a postcolonial lens to study Kipling's dealings with religions in South-Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It discovers that Kipling employs strategies of surveillance and knowledge of history and ethnography while handling religions in the novel. Such fictional employment of strategy and knowledge in characterising the South-Asian religions seems to have been colonially favourable in the contemporary socio-political context. Accordingly, this article argues that Kipling manipulates religions in his narrative for the sake of imperialism through surveillance of religions, consciousness of history, and ethnographic discourse that reflect his imperialist position.
{"title":"Kipling's Manipulation of Religions in Kim: A Document of his Imperialist Position","authors":"M. Habibullah","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0492","url":null,"abstract":"Since the publication of Rudyard Kipling's (1865–1936) Kim (1901), most critics have agreed that the novel falls into the genre of colonial fiction. But they are divided into two groups – defenders and detractors – regarding Kipling's treatment of religions in the novel. The defenders celebrate his accomplishment and sympathy in depicting the devotion and attraction of the Victorian Era towards Buddhism. On the other hand, the detractors blame Kipling for fictionalising the confrontation between pragmatic Western rationality and Eastern mystical irrationality. Against this backdrop, this article revisits the novel with a postcolonial lens to study Kipling's dealings with religions in South-Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It discovers that Kipling employs strategies of surveillance and knowledge of history and ethnography while handling religions in the novel. Such fictional employment of strategy and knowledge in characterising the South-Asian religions seems to have been colonially favourable in the contemporary socio-political context. Accordingly, this article argues that Kipling manipulates religions in his narrative for the sake of imperialism through surveillance of religions, consciousness of history, and ethnographic discourse that reflect his imperialist position.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47349552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Heather Bozant Witcher, Collaborative Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: Sympathetic Partnerships and Artistic Creation","authors":"Cátia Costa Rodrigues","doi":"10.3366/vic.2023.0497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2023.0497","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45880639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}