Haunted Texts: Studies in Pre-Raphaelitism in Honour of William E. Fredeman (review)

This intriguing festschrift honours the self-acknowledged 'inventor' of Pre-Raphaelite studies, William ('Dick') E. Fredeman. David Latham, currently editor of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, states that 'Haunted Texts attempts to meet the challenge of defining and illustrating the full spectrum of Pre-Raphaelitism.' Defining the full spectrum of 'Pre-Raphaelitism' - a term including not only the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, but the Arts and Crafts movement and fin-de-siècle decadence - may be beyond the capacity of any single volume, but this collection will make a large contribution to any reader's understanding of the richness and diversity of the movement.

But what makes Haunted Texts stand out among festschrifts is its dramatically direct encounter with the scholar-collector it honours. Latham's prefatory anecdote of his meeting with the vigorous professor from the University of British Columbia demonstrates Fredeman's almost frightening enthusiasm both for collecting Pre-Raphaelite art and proselytizing for Pre-Raphaelite studies. Ira B. Nadel provides an eye-opening description of what it was like to work with 'Dick' as the demanding coeditor of what was then called the Journal ofPre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies (1987-90). And the closing essay reprints Fredeman's vainglorious but fascinating 'The Great Pre-Raphaelite Paper Chase: A Retrospective,' first presented as the keynote dinner address at the 'Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle' conference held at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas on 21 April 1994. In this detailed essay - which this reviewer remembers as a two-hour-long after-dinner speech - Fredeman recounts his extraordinary activities as scholar-adventurer, including his legendary discovery in a garret at Penkill Castle in Scotland of a treasure trove of Pre-Raphaelite portfolios, framed paintings and engravings, and manuscript letters. Together with the checklist of Fredeman's publications also included, Haunted Texts constructs a vivid biographical and autobiographical portrait of the inimitable Fredeman.

The essays themselves provide a remarkable cross-section of Pre-Raphaelite studies at the present time, or almost fifty years since Fredeman had to persuade his dissertation committee at the University of Oklahoma to allow him to write on a topic they didn't consider a bona fide area of research. Perhaps because they vary so much in methodology and critical approach, as well as subject matter, the essays speak to each other and reward reading together. Latham's ambitious introduction seeks to define 'Pre-Raphaelitism' as well as to sum up Fredeman's achievements in the field - an endeavour that mirrors Fredeman's own essay. Jerome McGann's and E. Warwick Slinn's essays both note the importance of Dante Rossetti's Early Italian Poets, but where McGann discusses Rossetti's theory of translation and then provides close readings of individual poems in relation to this theory, Slinn analyses the 'structure of desire' he believes Rossetti transfers from the Italian poets to The House of Life, proposing that this structure ends in the male speaker's 'self-enclosure.' These two essays are thus most usefully read together, precisely because they draw from the entirely different fields of translation and its poetics, and the psychoanalytic analysis of masculine desire. Roger Peattie's study of William Michael Rossetti's promotion of Christina Rossetti's career invites comparison with Fredeman's promotion of Pre-Raphaelites in general. J. Hillis Miller's Derridean analysis of how the original text, though still essential to scholars, is transformed by the new communications technologies is even more thought-provoking when compared with Nadel's description of Fredeman's dedicated discrimination of minute details that differentiated even a faithful facsimile from the original. Miller's analysis of a painting by Whistler as manipulated on the computer screen demonstrates that researchers today see 'details' never before seen by researchers, yet recognizes himself as uneasily poised between the two epochs of the printed book...