The Poets of the Nineties

This year I begin by citing one Nineties writer evaluating work by another. Arthur Machen’s review of Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” reprinted from Literature, March 26, 1898 (Faunus 21 [2010]: 3–5), is well worth having readily accessible to today’s Nineties aficionados. In noting affinities between Wilde’s poem and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” Machen contends that the latter often resorts to medieval effects whereas “The Ballad” employs present-day expression, at times verging on colloquialism. In addition, I think, negative implications about capital punishment and the keeping of the executed murderer at the level of everyday humanity instead of casting the man in symbolic terms suggest that a modern-postmodern aura hovers over Wilde’s poem. Machen’s review thus reveals an aspect of his critical equipment not usually associated with his work but that adds dimension to his stature. Growing interest in Wilde’s short fiction may be expedited by Oscar Wilde: The Complete Short Fiction, edited by John Sloan (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), and Anne Markey’s Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (Irish Academic Press, 2011). Each book sidesteps important textual matters, which probably await clarification from others, but meantime each will be useful in pointing the way toward further attention to Wilde’s short fiction. Another Irish Academic Press book, Oscar Wilde (2011), edited by Jarlath Killeen, offers nine essays, ranging from Anne Markey’s (fitting) assessment of the short fiction to Wilde’s criticism to Wilde on the web, which furnish an interesting spectrum attesting to Wilde’s continuing relevance.

A related book, Anna Budziak’s Text, Body, and Indeterminacy: Doppelgänger Selves in Pater and Wilde (Cambridge Scholars Publishing [2008]) focuses on selected texts by each author, drawing on theories of Richard Shusterman about the embodied self and on Richard Rorty’s concept of the textual self as underpinnings for her analyses. Not a book for beginners, this one will likely more immediately benefit advanced Nineties specialists, though neither Budziak’s ideas nor what might, to some, be an over-dense expression should deter anyone interested in Pater, Wilde, or critiques of the self.

I cite additional items only recently readily available. The Fowl and The Pussycat Love Letters of Michael Field (1876–1909) [Virginia, 2008], edited by Sharon Bickle, is a valuable addition to work about Katherine Bradley and her younger relative, Edith Cooper. Most of the letters are from Bradley to Cooper, but all illuminate the personal and artistic lives of these women who wrote as “Michael Field.” Even though Bickle ignores the work of Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo, whose work on “Michael Field” is essential for studies of the poems and life, the accessibility of this correspondence (which relieves the scholar of the necessity to decipher some difficult handwriting) is a plus for Nineties specialists and for those more generally interested in Victorian poetry and poets. Jill Galvan’s The Sympathetic Medium: Channeling the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919 (Cornell Univ. Press, 2010) throws interesting lights on the Society for Psychical Research, the New Woman movement, Henry James’s In the Cage (1898), and Dracula. Although relating Stoker’s novel to New Woman concerns is not news, persuasive merging of all these topics (to many, seemingly unconnected) within a single framework is Galvan’s success. What may be news appears in Tanya Pikula’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Late-Victorian Advertising Tactics: Earnest Men, Virtuous Ladies, and Porn” (ELT 55, no. 3 [2012]: 283–302), a compelling contention that all sorts of sexual subtexts in Dracula play to 1890s advertisements for commodities that would interest buyers because of covert sexuality in the advertisements. These sexual appeals have continued to draw later readers of Stoker’s novel and account for the popularity of Dracula films. J. Lawrence Mitchell’s “Rudyard Kipling, The Vampire, and the Actress” (ELT 55, no. 4 [2012]: 303–314) outlines an intricate textual problem connected with Kipling’s poem, arguing convincingly that it offers implications that Kipling and the actress, Lulu Glaser, enjoyed a secret affair. In a copy of The...