Decadence & Victorians Anthologies

BOOK REVIEWS the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field"), but also because White's essay maps some of the same ground as Thain's. In addition, Thain simplifies how complex and contradictory a poetic can become when it both wrestles with and embraces, in Thain's own words, "multiple identities" that "were also, partly at least, a way of allowing [the poets] to explore competing sides of their personalities." Thain is at her best when analyzing the exchanges that a collaborative "poetic" makes possible between "muse" and "poet," as in her reading of "Ί am thy charge, thy care!'"—a poem from The Wattlefold. Few errors of a typographical kind appear in Thain's study, but one sort seems especially amusing in this case, if accidental. As testimony to the linguistic trouble Field's inventive authorship can produce for conventional rules of English, Thain often uses "Field" as a collective plural—as in "Ruskin's vicious criticism of the Field's poetry" and "the Field's personal life and their relationship"—though not always, as in "the Fields' diary notes" (5). While the former instances might appear sheer lapses in apostrophe location, other instances—"In the Journals, Field describe Lee as..." (13), "Field advocate the special bond between women" (35), and "Field bypass the problems faced" (43)—accumulate to suggest that this choice is quite deliberate. Deliberate or not, a sentence like the following suggests a new kind of standardization that will probably not catch on: "The tension between Vernon Lee and the Field's adds to the evidence that the Field's were not easy company" (14). Holly Laird ________________ University of Tulsa Decadence & Victorians Anthologies The English Literary Decadence: An Anthology. Christopher S. Nassaar, ed. Lanham: University Press of America, 1999. xxxviii + 416 pp. $32.50 The Victorians: A Major Authors Anthology. Christopher S. Nassaar, ed. Lanham: University Press of America, 1999. xxiii + 806 pp. $62.50 WHEN ARTHUR SYMONS in 1893 labeled J.-K. Huysmans's A Rebours "the breviary of the Decadence," the term Decadence held special meaning for him and certain poets and painters who considered themselves members of an aesthetic elite. Today, it would seem, the term obscures thought. Like other literary labels, Decadence has acquired multiple meanings. Some prefer to regard it as a matter of style. Others use the term as descriptive of perverse behavior. Then there are those 73 ELT 45 : 1 2002 who consider it mainly as a manifestation of extreme aestheticism requiring new and unique sensations. In his introduction to this anthology of English literary Decadence, Nassaar takes a run at Decadence through an examination of what he regards are the central themes that dominate Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance, a "corruptive volume" that so influenced young men of his day who devoured it. Nassaar credits Pater with starting a new movement in Victorian literature, of writing a work that "sparked the Decadent movement in English literature, a movement that led finally to the dark core of the human soul and to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness." To compound matters, after a brief explication of Wilde's Salome, Nassaar concludes that the Heart of Darkness is "a criticism of Salome and of Decadence in general—an entirely pessimistic reply to the Decadent delight in human evil." Nassaar's introduction, as provocative as it may be, gives a somewhat less than satisfying overview of Decadence and the selections that make up his anthology. To exemplify his concept of Decadence, Nassaar divides his material into three categories. In "The Inception," he provides ten selections from the Renaissance; prominent among them are Pater's essays on Botticelli , Michelangelo, and Wincklemann, as well as the "hedonistic" Conclusion . In the second part, "The Early Nineties," he includes poems from Barlas, Dowson, Gray, Johnson and others of similar ideological fit and literary merit, plus prose pieces from Beerbohm and Symons and from Wilde's Salome in its entirety. "The Aftermath" is given over to Conrad's most popular and widely read work, the Heart of Darkness, which was "heavily influenced by the Decadent movement and is in fact a restatement of its major themes against an African-Darwinian background ... in a...