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  • Recent Studies in the Nineteenth Century
  • Linda Dowling (bio)

This, the last SEL nineteenth-century survey to carry a date beginning with “19—,” makes no attempt to provide complete coverage of this year’s work in Romantic and Victorian studies. The total number of books received for review was 250, about 15 percent more than last year. Only slightly more than half of these titles, or roughly 15 percent less than last year, could be accommodated even within the generous compass that SEL allows its reviewers. The arithmetic of selectivity is disturbing, if not apocalyptic: less and less can be said about more and more. Moreover, as readers of past review essays will be aware, fewer major scholarly presses now send books. Under the circumstances, it seems merely a matter of time, a few years at most, before the SEL review essay—itself a survival from the literary culture of the great Victorian quarterlies—bears only a notional or nostalgic relation to the encyclopedic scope of its earlier life. Fin de siècle, fin du livre.

Irish Writing and Writers

Gregory A. Schirmer’s Out of What Began: A History of Irish Poetry in English argues that the double dependency of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy on both English and Irish culture “generated a disjunction between language and reality” (p. 5) which for Anglo-Irish poets materialized as an anxiety about using the English language and English poetic forms to describe Ireland. Schirmer’s chapter on the Irish Literary Revival argues that the “aristocratic” tendency in such Celtic Revival writers as W. B. Yeats and George Russell opened a channel for “variety and difference” (p. 166) that [End Page 791] earlier political poets had shut down in the name of a unitary Irish national identity. Vera Kreilkamp’s The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House carries off the difficult feat of addressing both an audience of specialists and a more general readership. Kreilkamp’s aim is to rescue the “Big House” novel from the distortions and disregard into which it has fallen as a result of anticolonialist criticism. Kreilkamp’s controlled and intelligent discussion of novels from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) to John Banville’s Birchwood (1982) advances her counterargument against her opponents while making available to ordinary readers the complexity and mordant humor of this neglected and persistently misinterpreted literary mode. Not least among the pleasures of this book are the grace and eloquence of its prose.

An attractively compact and richly illustrated Wilde Album, compiled by Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland, bears witness to the extraordinary effect that gender studies and the gay-lifestyle boom have had on Wilde’s contemporary fortunes. Holland has spent thirty years reassembling the images of his grandfather and his world dispersed at the time of Wilde’s arrest and trial. The photographs included in the volume make vivid the plenitude and charm of the social and family life Wilde put at risk in, as he famously described it, feasting with panthers. Holland also provides a foreword to The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia by Karl Beckson. Moving from “Adey, More” to “‘The Young King,’” the book’s 424 entries veer from what every purchaser might be expected to know (what happens in Lady Windermere’s Fan) to what some readers might prefer not to know (the endearments tendered to Oscar by one Clyde Fitch). Holland gracefully remarks that the publication of Beckson’s book means Rupert Hart-Davis’s magnificent edition of the letters may now be retired from its long service as a default Wilde encyclopedia. But readers ought not to be hasty. Though heavily dependent on The Letters of Oscar Wilde, Beckson’s book by no means replaces it. Readers wishing to know, for example, who the Ranee of Sarawak was, and how she regarded Wilde’s catastrophe will still need to unlimber (and perhaps rebind) their trusty Hart-Davis.

Jonathan Fryer’s André and Oscar: The Literary Friendship of André Gide and Oscar Wilde begins as a brisk, campy account of the several encounters between the two men from 1891 to 1900 (“André,” Fryer airily decides, “was far too mousey” for Wilde to be attracted to him [p...

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