Arthur Symons (1865-1945) produced some 60 volumes and pamphlets of poetry and prose, edited and introduced many more volumes, and wrote 1300 articles and reviews. This vast productivity is fully accounted for in Arthur Symons: A Bibliography.

Arthur Symons’s (1865–1945) prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequent influence on early-twentieth-century literature is well established. His biographer Karl Beckson aptly calls him “a major figure who helped stimulate the Modernist initiative.” The breadth of his artistic interests and critical commentary remains extraordinary. In addition to writing short stories, poems, plays, travel sketches, and translations, Symons was a prolific critic and editor who wrote about literature and what he termed “the seven arts.” Yeats famously offered him the laurel “best critic of his generation.” Symons championed freedom of subject matter and literary style and thus influenced the work of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and others, particularly in introducing them to the evocative work of French symbolist writers. Arthur Symons, Critic Among Critics: An Annotated Bibliography documents the scholarly attention Symons continues to receive not only for his critical influence, but for his own creative work. This annotated bibliography captures over 1300 articles, books, reviews, dissertations, and other writings about Symons, revising and updating Carol Simpson Stern’s 1974 bibliography published in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. Over 1000 new items appear, some of these from unsigned articles now identified as written by authors such as Virginia Woolf and John Middleton Murry. The book, arranged alphabetically by author with annotations in paraphrase style, includes a helpful index and provides a chronological list of works published from the1880s to early 2007 that will prove useful in tracing the evolution of criticism about Symons

"An original contribution to Shaw scholarship," says Michel Pharand, editor of SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, who aptly summarizes Bernard Dukore’s book: This “systematic survey of how Shaw dramatizes slavery to and revolt against duty, and tricks of the governing class, has not previously been attempted. Proceeding chronologically and providing full historical context when needed (instructive also are the many parallels to contemporary history), Dukore pays scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy, and his language is fluid and jargon-free." The first part of the book’s subtitle derives from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, which describes its protagonist, and from Ibsen’s A Doll House, whose protagonist renounces slavery to duty and conventional morality. The subtitle’s second part is from Major Barbara, in which a powerful capitalist, a member of the governing class, refers to tricks designed to make people act in ways that profit it. The powerful instill slavery to duty and ensure that organizations aiming to alleviate the suffering of the poor act in ways that benefit the controlling class’s interests. With astonishing variety, Shaw dramatizes slavery to and revolt against duty and the tricks of the governing class in thirty-seven of his more than fifty plays from 1892 to 1948. Whereas some characters are bound by duty, others free themselves from the many different forms of trickery. Perhaps surprising is the twenty-first century pertinence of these themes, including the hypocrisy of capitalists who use phrases charged with the words “duty” and “morality” to justify their greed as well as their devious uses of education, religion, and the press.

What is the relationship between E. M. Forster’s quintessentially British novels, stories and essays and the abstrusely historical and erotic musings of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy? The answer is both complex and illuminating.The apparent differences are bridged by Forster’s penchant for antiquities and interest in matters Oriental, by Cavafy’s Anglophilia and British education. While these facts have generated comparative criticism that places novelist and poet in a Hellenistic continuum, the scholarly discussion to date has overlooked the ideological tensions that separate these two important modernists along a cultural divide. Hellenism is a way into their shared interests in the classical past, yet it also marks a point of dissension regarding the essence of Greek civilization. Similarly, their Orientalist visions led them to radically diverse configurations of the East. Dr. Jeffreys’s parallel reading of Forster and Cavafy explains not only how Forster and Cavafy were both rooted in Western Hellenism, but also how their suppositions about it diverged significantly and how the two confronted the Orient in quite different ways. New light is also cast on their friendship; their different political views may have impeded its development. Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy makes use of unpublished documents, newly edited unfinished poetry (here made available for the first time to an English readership), and lesser-known texts, both fictional and nonfictional. The exchange between literary and non-literary texts, prose and poetry, focuses the ideological center of Forster’s lifelong engagement with Greece and India and identifies the essence of Cavafy’s prolonged fixation on matters Hellenic. In the process Jeffreys’s New Historicist study applies contemporary critical trends in modern Greek studies to Forster criticism, producing an incisive, fresh reading of the relationship and the Cavafy and Forster canons.

Harry Furniss (1854–1925) was a well-known if somewhat abrasive figure in English literary, artistic and political circles during the half century either side of 1900. In March 1905, at the invitation of the Dickens Fellowship, he delivered in London’s Memorial Hall a platform lecture on Dickens and his illustrators, “A Sketch of Boz,” illuminated by some sixty magic lantern slides. Over the next two years Furniss toured the provinces with an enlarged version of this lecture. An Edwardian’s View of Dickens and His Illustrators is an edited and annotated transcription of the unpublished manuscript of this engaging lecture, together with the original illustrations, some of which are Furniss’s own. Few complete texts of oral lectures have survived and, coming from the pen (and pencil) of a professional book illustrator and keen Dickensian, “A Sketch of Boz” is an important document in the culture of Edwardian England. Professor Cordery’s substantial introduction discusses how the lecture sheds light on a number of fields: Dickens’s reputation and that of his illustrators in the early twentieth century; the cultural significance of the platform lecture; the changing style of illustration and caricature; the commercial and ideological exploitation of Dickens at the turn of the century. He summarizes the main illustrators surveyed by Furniss and includes more than 170 annotations. The book thus engages a variety of readers interested in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture.

ELT publishes articles on fiction, poetry, drama, or subjects of cultural interest in the 1880–1920 period of British literature. Submissions are typically 20–25 double-spaced pages. While we publish reviews of books about Joseph Conrad, Henry James, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, we do not publish articles on such major figures unless the discussion is linked to less-prominent authors of the era. We do not publish unsolicited book reviews.

Although the Victorian era closed, literally, with the death of the Queen in January 1901, the post-Victorian transition had begun decades earlier. Farewell, Victoria! presents Stanley Weintraub’s engaging perspectives on late-Victorian literature, primarily but not exclusively its fiction, which looked backward to popular antecedents and forward to the societal and technological future. The early 1880s saw the close of iconic Victorian literary careers—Disraeli, Rossetti, Eliot, Meredith, and Trollope among others. It was also the decade of new reputations that would continue in some cases into the middle of the next century. The 1890s witnessed a plethora of experiments in modernity. The Yellow Book and The Savoy, graphic realism and a redefinition of morals, futuristic prophecy and exotic fantasy would expand taste, enlarge the market for books, and write a finis to leftovers from the past.

Scarcely two years later Walter Pater’s death, Macmillan & Co. published Gaston de Latour: An Unfinished Romance. The author of works critical to the formation of the Transition and Modernist periods set his last novel in the turbulent years following the Reformation. For a century readers have seen only a portion of what pater wrote for Gaston de Latour. Gaston de Latour: The Revised Text is edited from the holographs and based on definitive material incorporating all know fragments and includes crucial suppressed chapters.

H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier, the first book-length study of H.R.H.'s African fiction, revises the image of Rider Haggard (1856–1925) as a mere writer of adventure stories, a brassy propagandist for British imperialism. Professor Monsman places Haggard’s imaginative works both in the context of colonial fiction writing and in the framework of subsequent postcolonial debates about history and its representation. Like Olive Schreiner, Haggard was an Anglo-African writer straddling the moral divide of mixed allegiances—one empathetically African, the other quite English. The context for such Haggard tales as King Solomon’s Mines and She was a triad of extraordinary nineteenth-century cultures in conflict—British, Boer, and Zulu. Haggard mined his characters both from the ore of real-life Africa and from the depths of his subconscious, giving expression to feelings of cultural conflict, probing and subverting the dominant economic and social forces of imperialism. Monsman argues that Haggard endorses native religious powers as superior to the European empirical paradigm, celebrates autonomous female figures who defy patriarchal control, and covertly supports racial mixing. These social and political elements are integral to his thrilling story lines charged with an exoticism of lived nightmares and extraordinary ordeals. H. Rider Haggard on the Imperial Frontier will be of interest to readers of imperial history and biography, “lost race” and supernatural literature, tales of terror, and heroic fantasies. The book’s unsettling relevance to contemporary issues will engage a wide audience, and the groundbreaking biographical account of Haggard’s close contemporary Bertram Mitford in the appendix will add appeal to specialists.

Rudyard Kipling claimed that he never wrote "the bland drivel of the globetrotter." As a journalist for seven years in India, he watched tourists scurry across the land and then publish their superficial impressions. Ironically over the course of his life, Kipling too became a tourist, visiting and describing six continents. Kipling was just twenty-three years old when he reached San Francisco in May 1889; he immediately began recording the sights and sounds of boom-town America. For four months he toured the United States, publishing accounts of his journey in the Pioneer, a major newspaper in western India. A few years later, when he lived in Vermont (1892-1896) with his American wife, Kipling wrote several syndicated articles published in both England and the U.S. Then in 1899 he revised and abridged the Pioneer versions and published them in From Sea to Sea. The second series of syndicated articles he collected in Letters of Travel (1920). Most of these travel writings are now out of print. In Kipling's America, Professor D. H. Stewart brings all of these articles together and reproduces the original printed versions; he sets the context with an engaging introduction and helpful annotations. Readers are provided with the opportunity to hear again Kipling at his cocky and often opinionated best. From Kipling's perspective, America unleashed the chaotic energy latent in human beings, and he was uncertain whether this energy inevitably would be productive or destructive.