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Book Reviews nineteenth century and the Greek legacy, it is both Mind and Matter which are evolving toward a point of perfection—"to the highest differentiated organism and the purest abstractions," as he puts it in the notebooks. The course of WUde's intellectual development at Oxford, not surprisingly, was diverse and complex. Smith and Helfand are to be commended for their arduous efforts in retracing the steps Wilde followed—steps that the unassisted reader of the notebooks would be hard pressed to follow. In the third section of their commentary, "The Text as Context," the editors do an equally thorough job of reassessing Wilde's criticism in light of the convictions expressed in the notebooks. They argue that "Wilde's critical position properly belongs not to the art-for-art's-sake movement but to the tradition of late Victorian cultural criticism." Not all readers, of course, will be persuaded to abandon long-held beliefs, but no reader, I suspect, will disagree that there is now ample evidence for assuming a philosophical seriousness beneath the razzle-dazzle of Wilde's wit. David B. Eakin McNeese State University Rhymers' Club and Dorian Gray Bruce Gardiner. The Rhymers' Club: A Social and Intellectual History . Donald Lawler. An Inquiry into Oscar Wilde's Revisions of the Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Garland, 1988. 121 pp. $35.00/ 138 pp. $35.00 THESE TWO BOOKS in the series of Garland publications in English and American literature are doctoral dissertations—obviously unrevised—and demonstrate characteristics of that genre: tightly focused, meticulously thorough in research, somewhat repetitious, and occasionally plodding and stuffy, at times lamentably so. Still, each of these studies offers valuable insights into the topics addressed, important topics to students of British literary culture in the 1880s and 90s: the evolution the Rhymers' Club; and Wilde's artistry and intentions in revising his controversial novel, Dorian Gray. The essential concept of Bruce Gardiner's analysis of the Rhymers' Club may be conveniently seen in his schematic figures which appeared (in my copy of the book) as a dubbed-in frontispiece: Figure 1 "Embryology"; and Figure 2 "Generations." In the "embryology ," Gardiner diagrams some interlocking geometrical forms illustrating the prior personal associations which "may have led" to the 109 ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 individual introductions to the Club: i.e., who knew whom, when. And in his boxed layout of the "generations," Gardiner has organized into three tiers of three boxes each the membership of The Rhymers—13 poets in all—plus their "Associates," 25 of them, and a host of significant literary "others" in the 1890s who in some tangential way affected the progress of this group. Though the Rhymers as an entity lasted for relatively few years—from early 1890 to somewhere perhaps in 1895—Gardiner distinguishes clearly between these essential nine clusters. In all, this roster reads like a Who's Who of the 90s in London, with the actual members including those one normally associates with the group: W B. Yeats, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson , and Richard Le Gallienne. The list of "Associates" included Wilde, Albert Moore, John Gray, William Watson, and Edward Garnett . The surprise, at least for me, lay in the inclusiveness of this latter group: among them Swinburne, Hopkins, Henry James, George Moore, Gissing, Conrad, Housman, Henley, Kipling, Synge, Wells, Stevenson, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Beerbohm. One could well ask which literary figures around London in those years were not "others." Indeed, as I scanned this roster, I looked to the back of the book in search of explanatory notes for some verification. But Alas! None to be found. Such notes are not normally part of a dissertation; and no editorial apparatus was appended to this publication. One would have helped here. Although we are clearly told at the beginning on the copyright page and again at the end of the text proper, on page 189, that this is a dissertation (1983), it becomes quite evident early in this study even without these markers that we are looking at such a document. Although the copyright date is 1988, the bibliography indicates no use of any item later than 1979, and only a few items...

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