Foreign Correspondence: ELT Authors in France and Other European Countries

271 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: ELT AUTHORS IN FRANCE AND OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES By Pierre Coustillas (Université de Lille) Although there is no equivalent in France of what has been for years acknowledged in England as a Transition period between Victorian literature and modernism, French interest in ELT authors is very much alive. As time passes these tend to be seen in a more solid perspective and an increasing number of publishers offer literary works of the period in translation as well as studies of the major figures. Among the latest collections of articles is that offered by the Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier) for April 1985, which contains substantial pieces by French and American scholars on Pater ("The Child in the House"), Hardy ("Thomas Hardy and J. M. W. Turner"), Conrad ("The Two Lives of Joseph Conrad in 'The Secret Sharer'"), Henry James (on the image of Paris in The Ambassadors), and Shaw (on his debt to Swift). The Symposium on literature and art, announced by the French Society for Victorian and Edwardian Studies and mentioned in my preceding report (25:4, 1982), was duly held in Besancon in 1983 and the papers that were read have been collected in the Annales Littéraires de l'Université de Besancon (No. 308, 1985). The ELT authors represented are William Morris, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Both journals have published a steady flow of articles, many of them in English, in the last few years. Special mention must be made for Cahiers Victoriens of No. 16, with contributions on Conrad, Butler, Morris, Pater and Wilde, and of No. 18, a Kipling number, and for Annales Littéraires of No. 267 (1982) with an article by Marie-Claire Hamard on the illustrators of The Yellow Book. L'Epoque conradienne has just issued its 1985 number, which contains twelve articles, one on Lafcadio Hearn's mental landscape and eleven on Conrad, most of them on his early and middle works. The fifty-page study of Conrad and the Bible by Francois Lombard is the most thorough piece in this 200page volume. Readers of Etudes Anglaises are sure to find reviews of books on ELT authors in every number, and Gissing students may look forward to the publication in the OctoberDecember number of a major article by Robert L. Selig on Gissing's obscure Chicago period; he reveals the identity of the man on the staff of the Tribune who accepted the novelist 's first short stories. As regards the works on ELT novelists and short story writers the most recent titles have come as previously from both trade publishers and university presses. Worthy of 272 special attention is the second volume of Conrad's works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, under the general editorship of Sylvére Monod. It covers the period from Youth to The Mirror of the Sea. Each work is offered in a highly reliable and readable French translation, with detailed notes and a scholarly commentary. Volume III is not expected to appear until 1987. A less expected but equally welcome translation is that of a little read title by Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920). Bernard Loing is the translator and Michel Niqueux, who teaches Russian at the University of Caen, has supplied an introduction and notes. The moderately priced volume is published by Editions A. M. Métailié and distributed by the Presses Universitaires de France. To Bernard Loing, Wells scholars are also indebted for a major study of the early Wells at work, Η_^ G^ Wells a_ 1 ' oeuvre: Les Débuts d'un Ecrivain (Paris: Didier Erudition, 1984). The novels, whose history is discussed from their earliest versions to their publication in book form, are The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) , and Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900). The appendices include a selection of a hundred letters, many of them unpublished, as well as facsimiles of rough drafts of the three novels. The Presses Universitaires de Lille have recently reissued Nouvelles Choisies de George Gissing, edited by P. Coustillas, as well as two new collections of short stories, also edited by P. Coustillas and translated under...