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

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 An Edwardian’s View of Dickens and His Illustrators is an edited and annotated transcription of the unpublished manuscript of this engaging lecture, together with the original illustrations, some of which are Furniss’s own.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.

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.

In her novels and short stories, May Laffan Hartley (1849–1916) depicts the religious and political controversies of late nineteenth- century Ireland. Helena Kelleher Kahn reintroduces us to Laffan’s vivid, witty fiction, rich in political and social commentary. Laffan did not offer clear-cut approval to one side or the other of the social and religious divide but weighed both and often found them wanting. She adds a missing dimension to the Irish world of Wilde, Shaw, Moore and Joyce. A woman of the age subtly embroiders the acute challenges and divisions of middle-class Ireland. As Kahn says, “she chose to write about the alcoholic ex-student, the impecunious solicitor, the farmer or merchant turned politician, and their often resentful wives and children. On the whole her world view was pessimistic. Rural Ireland was a beautiful intellectual desert. Dublin was a place to leave, not to live in.” This account of her life and work will be of interest to students of Anglo-Irish literature and history, as well as women’s studies.

Oscar Wilde: Recent Research updates and reconceptualizes the bibliographic objectives of the earlier Oscar Wilde Revalued. This new volume surveys research on Wilde from 1992 to 2000, but in a much more explicitly evaluative manner. The opening chapter, “Wilde in the 1990s,” traces the main directions of Wilde research over the past decade. Critical material is then reviewed under three broad categories. The first, Biography, is concerned with the continuing fascination with Wilde’s life, and its emphasis on how critics have moved on from dissatisfaction with Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde (1987). Recent Critical Paradigms evaluates research channelled through master-narratives that have emerged in the 1990s, ways of describing Wilde’s work: the “gay” Wilde, the “Irish” Wilde, and “Wilde and Consumerism.” Wilde the Writer, the third category, centres on an important trend in research during the last decade, what might be thought the less glamorous aspects of the oeuvre—from the seriousness with which Wilde took his role as a poet, to the sheer amount of time he devoted to writing journalism, to the complexities of the production and staging of the plays. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research also contains sections devoted to sources and intertexts, to thematic studies, to essay collections, and to critical monographs which take Wilde as their sole subject. The book includes information about new research resources, and about manuscript discoveries and letters. It concludes with an extensive bibliography organized alphabetically and in terms of Wilde’s works and an index of critics.

A Book of Words, Kipling’s own selection of his speeches published in 1928, reflects a variety of topics and audiences. He spoke to schoolboys about literature, to Brazilians about “the spirit of the Latin,” to the Royal Geographical Society about travel, to navy men about sailors, to ship owners about shipping, to university students about independence. Many of his speeches have remained uncollected and virtually unknown. A Second Book of Words collects what Kipling left uncollected. The speeches in this new book date from 1884 to 1935. We see Kipling at different moments before different audiences. We hear how he talked to his Sussex neighbors, or how he addressed a parliamentary committee, or a South African election meeting, or a club of London doctors, or his fellow honorary degree recipients at Cambridge. The more substantial, formal speeches are equally various, marked by Kipling’s mastery of language, a few passing over into a violent extravagance of feeling—the attack on the Liberal government in the speech of 16 May 1914 or the speech on war aims of 15 February 1918. Usually, however, the tone is urbane, the artistic aim to instruct through delight. Kipling knew that the maker of speeches and the poet were subject to the same law: “Unless they please they are not heard at all.” A Second Book of Words adds another forty-eight speeches to the thirty-eight that Kipling chose to make public, printing all the known uncollected speeches—long or short, carefully meditated or spontaneous, tendentious or diplomatic. Another twenty-five for which no text has so far been found are identified, as are the speeches that he is known to have written for members of the royal family.

Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth takes issue with many assumptions current in Wilde scholarship. It sets an engaging course in exploring Wilde’s literary reputation. In particular, Professors Guy and Small are interested in the tension between Wilde’s enduring popularity with the general reading public as a perennially witty entertainer and his status among academics as a complex, politicized writer attuned to the cultural and philosophical currents associated with modernity. Their argument focuses initially on the prominence of biographical readings of Wilde’s literary works, drawing attention to the contradictions in the ways biographers have described his life and to the problems of seeing his writing as a form of self-disclosure. Subsequent chapters assess the usefulness of other forms of academic scholarship to understanding works that are not, on the surface, “difficult.” Here a number of commonly held views are challenged. To what extent is De Profundis autobiographical? How sophisticated is the learning exhibited in Intentions? In what ways are the society comedies “about” homosexuality? And how does The Picture of Dorian Gray relate to Wilde’s “mature” style? The volume also examines some of Wilde’s lesser-known, unfinished works and scenarios, including The Cardinal of Avignon, La Sainte Courtisane, and A Florentine Tragedy (all printed as appendices), arguing that these “failed” works provide important insight into the reasons for Wilde’s popular success. Since Guy and Small have authored numerous articles and books on Wilde, Studying Oscar Wilde: History, Criticism, and Myth will be a must read for scholars, but it is also written in a jargon-free language that will speak to that wider audience of readers who enjoy Oscar Wilde.

The "Conclusion" to The Renaissance advises the responsive critic to consider carefully "the various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age." Transparencies of Desire brings together twenty-one varied, contentious, informative essays that confirm Pater's ongoing power to captivate and challenge readers. The interdisciplinary breadth of the collection demonstrates that the critical culture of Pater studies is always multifaceted--inviting diverse theoretical perspectives yet also demanding that any paradigm of analysis (feminist, new historicist, aesthetic, queer theory, formalist, biographical, Foucauldian) be tested and redefined. Scholars from five different countries reconsider Pater's career and canon, the reception of his works, the intersections of genre, gender, and aesthetics, and the implications of Pater's writings--in aesthetics, fiction, philosophy, archaeology, art history--for contemporary cultural studies.