The busy first day of the seminar will involve a round of meetings throughout the morning. At 9.30am, Monday, June 22, the Project Director, Professor Joseph Bristow will introduce all of the participants to one another. He will explain both the aims and objectives of the Summer Seminar, the schedule of assigned and recommended readings, the short research-based presentations, and his office hours. Before the coffee break, the visiting scholars will meet with Bruce Whiteman, Librarian of the Clark, who will introduce members of his staff. Mr. Whiteman will explain the various procedures that all library users must follow. Further, he will acquaint the participants with the hard-copy and online catalogs. Thereafter, the seminar members will meet with Alastair Thorne, technical assistant of the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. Mr. Thorne will explain a number of matters relating to the online terminals, printers, MOODLE site, and wi-fi system available to the participants. The visiting scholars will also be introduced to the two Graduate Student Assistants (GSAs), who will be able to receive and fulfill orders for books and articles that the participants would like to obtain from other libraries in the UCLA system. The GSAs will be available to meet with the participants during the mid-morning break of each and every session.
During lunch on our first day, which will be funded by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies (which oversees all academic programs arranged at the Clark Library), participants will have the opportunity to meet the Director of Center, Professor Peter Reill, the Assistant Director, Elizabeth Landaw, and several members of the library staff: Bruce Whiteman (Librarian), Carol Sommer (Librarian), Scott Jacobs (Reader Services), and Suzanne Tatian (Coordinator of Programs and Fellowships). In addition, the participants will meet with the two Graduate Research Assistants who will be responsible for locating, borrowing, and delivering printed sources held at other libraries within UCLA’s extensive library system.
In the afternoon, Professor Bristow will hold six to seven fifteen-minute meetings with individual participants. These short meetings will enable him to make sure that each visiting scholar has settled in comfortably to the Los Angeles area. Moreover, he will take notes on each participant’s research interests. The result of these meetings will be a list of contact information and research interests that will be posted on the MOODLE website.
On Tuesday, June 23, the participants will be invited to a series of meetings held on the main UCLA campus at Westwood, some twelve miles from the Clark Library. The purpose of this morning session is to introduce the visiting scholars to the resources of the Young Research Library (YRL), which ranks among the finest university research libraries in the world. Of special interest to the participants will be the YRL’s Department of Special Collections, which contains a number of resources that relate to the seminar syllabus. Among its excellent holdings are some of the papers of Holbrook Jackson, author of the The Eighteen-Nineties (1913), which the participants will evaluate on Wednesday, June 24. Besides receiving tours of both the main library and the Department of Special Collections, the visiting scholars will also be able to register as library users through the Bruin Online office. Once they have registered with Bruin Online, the participants will—with the help of Alastair Thorne—be able to download the software that will give them access to a range of web-based resources to which UCLA subscribes. The “Bruin Card” will also provide seminar members will full access to a range of UCLA’s sports and related facilities.
On Wednesday, June 24, the participants will have the opportunity to gain insights into the ways in which scholars have approached the “decadent 1890s.” Discussion will focus on evaluating three sources that provide detailed overage of the literary (and, more broadly, cultural and social) history of the period. The first reading will be Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen-Nineties, which has remained pretty much in print ever since it first appeared. Participants will be expected to obtain a copy of this remarkably study, which still stands as an important point of reference in the field. The visiting scholars will compare Holbrook’s volume with two recent anthologies of fin-de-siècle writings: Talia Schaffer, ed., Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Harlow: Longman, 2007); and Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds., The Fin de Siècle, c. 1880-1900: A Reader in Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Taken together, these three volumes will enable the participants to understand how and why “decadence” became so firmly attached to the more experimental writings of the 1890s. Moreover, they will be able to see why the negative connotations of terms such as “decadent” and “fin-de-siècle” have not always served such a dynamic period of literary history particularly well. The two recent anthologies will give the participants the opportunity to look at some of the better-known 1890s accounts of literary and cultural decadence—especially Arthur Symons “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), Max Nordau’s Degeneration (translated 1895), and Hugh M. Stutfield’s “Tommyrotics” (1895). In addition, this session will provide the visiting scholars with a fairly detailed literary map of the period, which will help them to see the broader context in which the writings on the syllabus were produced and consumed.
Our session on Friday, June 26, focuses on The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (London: Elkin Mathews, 1892), which brought together samples of the early work of the male poets who met on a regular basis at the Cheshire Cheese public house on Fleet Street. Several of the members of this talented poetic set would soon become synonymous with the “decadence” that commentators in the mid-1890s detected in avant-garde writing. Particularly important in this respect are Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and Ernest Dowson. One of the most noted members of the Rhymers’ Club, W.B. Yeats, would reflect on the premature deaths of Johnson and Dowson in his famous memoir, “The Tragic Generation” (1922). Participants will be invited to study Yeats’s memories of this grouping (as well his recollections of Oscar Wilde) alongside those sections of the great modernist poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) by Ezra Pound, which recall Pound’s encounters with Victor Plarr, who was actively involved in the Club. Reference copies of both these works will be available. There are three full-length studies of the Rhymers’ Club, including Norman Alford’s 1980 monograph. Seminar members will be able to consult these works, along with Nicholas Frankel’s important essay, “‘A Wreath for the Brows of Time’: The Books of the Rhymers’ Club as Material Texts,” in Joseph Bristow, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary History and the 1890s (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005).
At the start of the second week, on Monday, June 29, we will continue our discussion of the Rhymers by looking closely at The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), which is much more substantial than its predecessor. This session will give the participants the chance to look at the memoir of another Rhymer, Richard Le Gallienne, whose study, The Romantic ‘90s, appeared in 1925. Background on the lists that Mathews and Lane maintained will be available in James G. Nelson’s The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), and Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, and Pound (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1989). Nelson’s study adds to the scholarship of J. Lewis May, John Lane and the Nineties (London: John Lane, 1936). May’s papers are held at the Clark.
On Wednesday, July 1, the visiting scholars will proceed to explore the writings of three women poets who were published by Mathews and Lane. The first is Dollie Radford, a socialist poet author whose spouse, Ernest Radford, helped found the Rhymers’ Club. The second and third are Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who published together under the name of Michael Field. Radford’s A Light Load (which Mathews issued in 1891 and again in 1897) and Michael Field’s Sight and Song (1892) (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane) and Underneath the Bough (London: George Bell, 1893) point to the ways in which talented women poets of the period shared their male contemporaries’ interests in fixed forms, ekphrasis, and what is generally known in the period as the “religion of art.” All of these writers, too, had a strong interest in developing a poetics that was unapologetic about sexuality. New scholarship on Radford is available in Ruth Livesey, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). There is a growing body of criticism on the works of Michael Field, notably Marion Thain, “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson, eds., Michael Field and Their World (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007).
Our session on Friday, July 3, will expand the participants’ growing knowledge of fin-de-siècle women poets by offering the opportunity to compare Radford’s and Michael Field’s respective volumes with the immense critical success of Alice Meynell’s Poems (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1893). Meynell commanded great authority as a poet throughout her long career, and together with her husband she was actively involved in developing a distinctly Roman Catholic literary culture. Further, her essays comprise some of the most important contributions to late-Victorian debates about prosody. Participants will be able to address not only Meynell’s popular 1893 volume but also her Later Poems (London: John Lane, 1902). Since the appearance of June Badeni’s biography, The Slender Tree (Padstow: Tabb House, 1981), there has been a growing body of thoughtful scholarship on Meynell’s achievements, including, most recently, Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000), Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), and Yopie Prins, “Patmore’s Law, Meynell’s Rhythm,” in Bristow, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle Poem.
At the start of the third week, on Monday, July 6, the participants will have acquired such a large amount of knowledge about Mathews and Lane that they will be fully prepared to examine the contents of the first volume of Henry Harland’s The Yellow Book, which shocked the press when it appeared on bookstands in April 1894. Particularly important to study will be Max Beerbohm’s satirical “Defence of Cosmetics,” Ella D’Arcy’s sexually risky short fiction “Irremediable,” Arthur Symons’ sacrilegious poems “Stella Maris,” and George Egerton’s “city mood” tale “A Lost Masterpiece.” The visiting scholars will also need to contemplate why Henry James’s “The Death of the Lion” heads the table of contents. In order to comprehend the extraordinary ambition of this journal (which immediately became associated with decadence), the visiting scholars will need to consult a number of sources, especially Katherine Lyon Mix, A Study in Yellow: The Yellow Book and Its Contributors (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1960), Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, The Yellow Book: A Centenary Exhibit (Cambridge, MA; Houghton Library, 1994), and Winnie Chan, The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s (London: Routledge, 2007). The participants will also be encouraged to consult Karl Beckson, Henry Harland: His Life and Work (London: the Eighteen-Nineties Society, 1978). Harland, an American who settled in London, was something of a literary entrepreneur (some might say pretender), and his vision for The Yellow Book transformed the shape and scope of literary periodicals from this time onward.
The meeting on Wednesday, July 8, will look in depth at the second volume of The Yellow Book, on this occasion examining not only at the literary contributions but also the role that its young art editor, Aubrey Beardsley, played in making the journal such a scandalous affair. The most important literary pieces are by John Davidson (the poem “Thirty Bob a Week”), along with short stories by Charlotte Mew (“Passed”), Netta Syrett (“The Heart’s Desire”), Kenneth Grahame (“The Roman Road”), and Henry James (“The Coxon Fund”). Our discussion will observe that while Mathews and Lane issued volumes by some of the contributors, a number of the writers who placed work in this and succeeding issues of The Yellow Book were linked with William Ernest Henley’s ostensibly anti-decadent National Observer. Henley’s “Regatta,” as Max Beerbohm styled Henley’s male acolytes, would gain increasing prominence in Harland’s journal after Beardsley was fired in the spring of 1895. Sample issues of the National Observer from 1894 will be made available for the participants to consult. The participants will be able to consult a broad range of sources on Beardsley’s art, including Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and the catalogue raisonnée by Linda Gertner Zatlin that is scheduled to appear from Yale University Press in early 2009.
Our discussion on Friday, July 10, will broaden our understanding of Beardsley’s penchant for controversy by studying how and why he attracted the attention of Gleeson White, editor of The Studio, in 1893. White became interested in Beardsley when he saw the young artist’s design for Wilde’s French-language drama, Salomé, in 1893. (The previous before the British state had banned the production of Wilde’s drama because it was supposedly “half-biblical, half-pornographic.”) One of the greatest risks that Mathews and Lane took with Beardsley was their decision to commission his illustrations for Alfred Douglas’ English translation of Salomé, which they published in 1894. Beardsley, who quickly grew impatient with what he saw as Wilde’s arrogant manner, took the opportunity to mock Wilde in the scandalous illustrations for the 1894 edition. Beardsley’s antipathy to Wilde followed an earlier episode in which the Irish author parted company with another young artist. In 1892 Wilde was ready to sponsor the publication of the working-class poet John Gray’s Silverpoints: a collection of adept poems largely derived from well-known French Symboliste models. Once Gray became attached to poet Marc-André Raffalovich (who had for years abominated Wilde), Gray dissociated himself from the man who had been acting as his mentor. In 1893, Mathews and Lane issued Silverpoints in a unique binding designed by Charles Ricketts. In its review of this volume, the influential Pall Mall Gazette labeled Gray “Le Plus Decadent des Decadents.” Useful secondary reading includes (on Beardsley) Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and (on Gray) Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
The session on Monday, July 13, will focus on the first title to be published in Mathews and Lane’s widely noted “Keynotes” series, which arguably helped to define the character of fin-de-siècle English writing more forcefully than any other literary intervention of the time. Our focus will be George Egerton’s first volume of experimental stories, Keynotes, which of course gave the series its name. These works, which are indebted to their dedicatee (Knut Hamsun) for many of their innovations, form part of a decisively new type of feminist writing from this era. The participants will be invited to compare Egerton’s stories with Olive Schreiner’s Dreams (1890). Further, the visiting scholars will be asked to consult the volume, Monochromes (1895), by Ella D’Arcy, who played an important editorial role assisting Harland on The Yellow Book. At this stage, the participants will be sufficiently knowledgeable about Mathews and Lane to provide a critical assessment of Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990).
During the session on Wednesday, July 15, our attention will turn to another prominent work in the “Keynotes” series: Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895). Machen, who would earn an almost unrivaled reputation as a master of the supernatural tale, deepens our knowledge of the grotesque side of fin-de-siècle writing. We will have the opportunity to compare his work with Vernon Lee’s Hauntings (1890), as well as her contribution to the The Yellow Book, “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” (1896). Lee’s stories, which have received a growing amount of critical interest in recent years, differ from Machen’s in their approach to the supernatural, especially in relation to the late-Victoriana adaptation of techniques drawn from the Gothic. Important secondary reading includes S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, Ambrose Bierce, H.P. Lovecraft (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990). Participants will have access to a new edition of Lee’s Hauntings, ed. Patricia Pulham and Catherine Maxwell (Calgary: Broadview Press, 2005).
Even though Mathews and Lane published quite a number of volumes that were issued in limited edition for the collectors’ market (only 400 copies of Michael Field’s Sight and Song, for example, were printed), they were hardly averse to reprinting works that attracted a large readership, as we will discover on Friday, July 17. George Egerton’s Keynotes passed into several editions. So Grant Allen’s The British Barbarians (1895), which also prompted a satire: H.D. Traill’s The Barbarous Britishers (1896). Allen’s story features among a number of fine-de-siècle works whose sense of decadence involves a strong challenge to nineteenth-century ideals of progress. In Allen’s popular story, a ttwenty-fifth-century time traveler appears in 1890s Britain only to express shock at the kinds of taboos that inhibit modern society. The visiting scholars may be interested in exploring the charge, made in 1895, that H.G. Wells in one his stories published that year plagiarized Allen’s work. Traill’s satire will also be available. In the past decade, scholars have looked more closely than before at Allen’s prominence in the 1890s: William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers, ed., Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875-1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
On the morning of Monday, July 20, we will welcome our two invited speakers, Margaret D. Stetz and Mark Samuels Lasner, both of whom hold senior positions at the University of Delaware. Professor Stetz is one of the most distinguished scholars of 1890s English writing. Her very extensive list of publications includes the collection (edited with Cheryl A. Harris), Michael Field and Their World (2007), Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007), and Gender and the London Theatre, 1880-1920 (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2004). Mark Samuel Lasner is a noted collector of 1890s literature and a prominent member of the Grolier Club. Together with Margaret D. Stetz, he has published several volumes, including England in the 1890s: Literary Publishing at the Bodley Head (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990). Professor Stetz and Mr. Lasner will be available for individual consultations with the participants during the afternoon and also on Tuesday, July 21.
During our penultimate sessions on Wednesday, July 22, we will consider how the former publisher of pornography, Leonard Smithers, sought to continue to direction that had originally been taken by The Yellow Book in 1894. Smithers’ major literary venture in this regard was The Savoy, which Aubrey Beardsley and Arthur Symons jointly edited. The journal, which featured some of Beardsley’s most uncompromising drawings, last for eight issues, the first two of which are the most substantial. The participants will discuss the first number, which contains George Bernard Shaw’s irreverent “On Going to Church,” Arthur Symons’ essay on “Dieppe: 1895,” and Havelock Ellis’discussion of Zola’s fiction. This number also includes a story by W.B. Yeats, as well as poetry by Symons and Dowson. The best account of The Savoy is Stanley Weintraub’s introduction to his selection from the journal, The Savoy: Nineties Experiment (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966).
Our final session on Friday, July 24, will examine three of the volumes of poetry that Smithers issued in the years leading up to his bankruptcy in 1900: the second edition of Symons’ Silhouettes (1896), Dowson’s Verses, and Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Participants will be encouraged to consult a range of sources that throw light on Smithers’ relations with these controversial writers: Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000); Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). At 12.30pm, the participants will adjourn for a farewell luncheon hosted by the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, UCLA.