CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS最新文献

{"title":"Marie Corelli, Wormwood, and the Diversity of Decadence","authors":"J. DeCoux","doi":"10.4000/CVE.1337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.1337","url":null,"abstract":"Marie Corelli was, in her day, a wildly popular best-selling author and public figure, one who captured the public’s imagination with her dramatic and fantastical novels. Her great popularity and the apparently moralistic elements of her work have excluded her from the ranks of the fin-de-siecle British Decadents, a group (such as it exists) traditionally defined by its rejection of mainstream middle-class values and its desire to appeal to a select readership of aesthetically-minded intellectuals. Indeed, Corelli’s novel Wormwood is generally read as an anti-Decadent creed, or at the very least a novel which disingenuously castigates Decadence while titillating readers with themes and tropes “co-opted” from works of that genre.In fact, Wormwood is so often read in these terms because it eludes easy interpretation, a quality that marks it as a distinctly Decadent text. Corelli’s condemnation of the absintheur as a failed Decadent is a call not to moral orthodoxy, but to another, less recognizable but equally subversive model of Decadence. Some of the doubts the novel raises about the Decadent project and the troubled place of the Decadent in the nineteenth-century popular imagination are echoed by other Decadent works of the time.Reading Corelli’s novel in this way not only allows for a dramatic rethinking of her work, it also opens up a reconsideration of the ways that Decadence was embraced by the fin-de-siecle literary public, and the ways that public did not merely consume Decadence but refined and disseminated it. This reading also raises the possibility that the Decadent practice of drawing the boundaries of genre in tight and exclusionary ways served to encourage the production of numerous Decadences.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75234499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Alienation, Adoption or Adaptation? Aestheticist Paintings by Women","authors":"P. G. Nunn","doi":"10.4000/CVE.1364","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.1364","url":null,"abstract":"In scrutinising Aestheticism, feminist scholarship has found the usual characteristics: a band of male actors, achievers and heroes, an extensive use of female imagery, and an investment in the idea or fantasy of Woman in the absence (designed or accidental) of actual women. With regard to Aestheticism as a literary trend, scholars working under the influence of feminism, from Elaine Showalter on, have restored female agency to the territory, re-instating the achievements of various women writers in shaping Aestheticism in its own time, while provoking a reassessment of its meanings and messages through this problematising of the authority of its traditional movers and shakers (Schaffer and Psomiades, Women and British Aestheticism, 1999; Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes, 2000). The same has not occurred for the visual art of Aestheticism.To address the work of gender within Aestheticism, this paper proposes some specific works by women artists as characteristic of the style. In so doing it introduces several new names (Isobel Gloag, Constance Halford, Thea Proctor) into the cast of executive characters that the author contends are necessary to a full account of Aestheticism as a trend in British culture bridging the 19th and 20th centuries.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74022773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Evolution of Woman. George Eliot’s“Woman in France: Madame de Sablé”","authors":"Barbara Pauk","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2166","url":null,"abstract":"George Eliot’s engagement with gender ideology has often been discussed in relation to her novels even though she expresses her views on the so-called “woman question”much earlier, in her journalistic work. She was a contributor to the radical Westminster Review and, from 1852–54, also its editor. The various readings of one of her essays “Woman in France: Madame de Sable”, published anonymously in 1854, reflect the very different ways in which Eliot’s position regarding the woman question has been interpreted. For Shirley Foster, who compares her to the notorious antifeminist Sarah Ellis, the essay documents her antifeminism. Other critics, who mention this rarely-analysed essay, use it to illustrate Eliot’s feminist credo or, like Frederick R. Karl, find the text a contradictory one. The central claim of this essay is that in “Woman in France” Eliot makes a clearly feminist statement, expressed in a very subtle and innovative way. My argument will demonstrate that the variety of readings is due to the fact that the references to French women and French writers have often been overlooked.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78803977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Studio and the Craftsman as Artist: A study in periodical poetics (1893-1900)","authors":"Catherine Delyfer","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3101","url":null,"abstract":"The unprecedented boom in the art periodical press of the late nineteenth century contributed to shape and redefine the role of the artist in the eyes of the public. This paper examines the visual and discursive constructions and reconfigurations of the persona of the decorative artist in the influential fin de siecle magazine for the fine and applied arts The Studio. Founded in 1893 by Charles Holme and edited by Gleeson White, this periodical was created to proclaim the achievements of the Arts and Crafts designers. As any periodical, however, The Studio was a commercial venture too. Both a financial and an artistic success, it managed skillfully to combine serious articles by expert critics, popular New Journalism features, and beautiful illustrations. Analyzing the successive magazine covers, the visual matrix of the magazine, the rubric dedicated to artists’ interviews and the “Lay Figure” editorial pages, this study examines the poetics of the magazine to show how this periodical successfully promoted the craftsman (traditionally viewed as a practitioner of low arts) as the ideal liberal artist (high art). In The Studio, the craftsman became the new artistic paradigm, thus leading to major changes in the readers’ perception of the artist, the nature of art and their relation to industry and commerce.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85933885","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"À quel(s) public(s) s'adresse Darwin? L'Origine des Espèces, entre ouvrage scientifique, œuvre littéraire, et texte de vulgarisation","authors":"Camille Debras","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3099","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the rhetorical strategies used by Darwin to persuade his reader of the validity of evolution theory in The Origin of Species. The links between science, religion, moral and politics are so intricate in Victorian England that Darwin needs to convince public opinion as well as the scientific community. There are many sides to the reader whose reaction Darwin is anticipating when writing : scientist, humanist or not learned, religious or agnostic ? Darwin uses a conversational style to create a special closeness with his reader, as well as popular language and images to convince as wide an audience as possible while flattering his reader’s humanist appetencies thanks to various literary devices. As the literary dimension of the book blurs the limit between the popular and the learned, Darwin tries to reconcile the core dichotomy between the religious and the agnostic reader by an ambiguous reference to the agency of natural selection : is it merely a random natural process, or literally a transcending agent, another version of God’s action in the theory of evolution ?","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81176202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"De la petite chanson aux rafales du vent: le parcours de la ritournelle dans l'œuvre poétique d'Emily Brontë","authors":"C. Borie","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3073","url":null,"abstract":"According to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the ritornello’s first formulation is the little song a child sings to himself to find comfort when alone in the dark. It is a sound that repeats itself, forms a centre, becomes a motif, ends up coming in a rhythmic contact with what surrounds the territory it has created, until it vibrates in harmony with the Cosmos. This little song is to be found in Emily Bronte’s poetry, repeating itself, evolving, up until its essence is finally endorsed by the voice of the wind which woos the poet into a poetic transe. The incantatory resurgence of the ritornello punctuates the poetic mind’s trip from fancy to imagination, along which the idea of return applies less to the memory than to the repressed.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86351173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"« This is Hell – Hell - Hell ! » : les éléments dans The Nether World de George Gissing","authors":"Fabienne Gaspari","doi":"10.4000/cve.2833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2833","url":null,"abstract":"In The Nether World, published in 1889, Gissing portrays the squalid life of the working class in London through a very pessimistic vision of British society. The urban setting, which is used as a backdrop, also plays a crucial role in the creation of a universe akin to hell. The evocations of the landscape and of nature, which are rare but extremely efficient, therefore seem to serve the unfolding of a perfectly orchestrated narrative. Such evocations generate clusters of images which are first meant to convey some grim picture of reality but which also lead to a poetic and fleeting representation of the elements, a reverie on the « dung-heap » (a metaphor defining the naturalist novel) and on the flowers which grow from it.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87030369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Les quatre éléments dans « Karain » de Joseph Conrad : du mythe au manque","authors":"C. Delmas","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2830","url":null,"abstract":"The East and West dichotomy in “Karain” is in keeping with the romantic topos and underlined by the motif of the four elements. The vision of the sea, the sky and the island builds up an orientalist painting full of colours and light, and turns the Malay Archipelago into a mythic space to be opposed to the dreary and foggy representation of the West, an enclosed, corrupt and oppressive space paradoxically paralysed by economic and technological progress at the end of the Victorian era. However Conrad subverts the opposition by casting light on the illusion and artificiality of the representation and deconstructing the orientalist myth. The four elements first highlight the motif of human illusions and contribute to the symbolic function of the East ; they also serve a literary topos by enhancing the tragic muthos which is then immediately deconstucted ; the orientalist mode of representation is also called into question by impressionism, conveyed by fragmentation and the relativity of the point of view. The aestheticization of space in the orientalist painting clearly shows the decoy of representation and lets the reader have a glimpse of the reality of colonialism through the cracks of the painting. The four elements are subservient to Conrad’s imaginary vision, whose purpose was to make his reader hear, feel, and see the truth “below the surface of the visible universe” (The Nigger of the Narcissus), “disclosed in a moment of illusion” (Lord Jim) as in a trompe-l’œil. The truth is also that of a metaphysical void corresponding to the epistemological break at the turn of the century and the loss of faith and ideals.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86102632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Entre air et terre : les éléments dans Aurora Leigh d’Elizabeth Barrett Browning","authors":"M. Camus","doi":"10.4000/CVE.2825","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.2825","url":null,"abstract":"Surprisingly enough, despite the fact that it is strongly associated with femininity, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has no use for water as an element in her narrative of Aurora Leigh’s progress as a poet in the eponymous poem. Fire is only used in its usual purifying function, for the male protagonist. But she does construct a complex architecture from the elements of earth and air. She starts with the generally accepted duality of earth, both nurturing and a symbol of death. She multiplies the associations with air : angels and squirrels, wind and mountains, to cite only a few. She then examines and redefines the relationships between these two elements in life and in poetry and finally reaches a mystical union anchored in the body.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83399407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Dickens’s Theatrical Performance to Contemporary post Dickensian Narrative and Artistic Performance (Acker, Ackroyd, Waters and Rushdie)","authors":"G. Letissier","doi":"10.4000/CVE.3078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/CVE.3078","url":null,"abstract":"Recent studies have underlined the relevance of the Victorian Age (whose temporal boundaries have been stretched to include the “long nineteenth century”) to the postmodern era. This essay narrows the topic to Dickens’s own relevance to postmodern aesthetics, through the question of theatricality. Dickens’s invention of public readings may be seen as an innovative method to advertise literary production, but it is also a tangible illustration of the type of boundary crossing valued by postmodern writers. With Dickens, who in this respect is very much in the Sternean-Shandian vein, theatrical performance is both inside the text (e.g. the parodic staging of Hamlet in Great Expectations) and outside the text, when dramatized versions of his novels are specially written to be acted out. It is the author’s versatility (implied as he was in a whole range of activities: fiction-writing, editing, journalism, publishing initiatives, amateur theatricals, speeches, public readings, business undertakings and so forth), together with the plurality within his works (the neo-baroque effect, perceptible among other things through the so-called “streaky bacon” or the “wonderful gargoyles”), which have served as a springboard for contemporary fiction-writers. Sarah Waters’s fictions, notably Fingersmith, have been almost unanimously praised for their plots, described as sheer “tour de force”. It can be claimed that Waters’s narrative ploys are borrowed from the theatrical world which held a real fascination for Dickens. With English Music, Ackroyd, for his part, illustrates what Clayton in his study: Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003) calls “undisciplined” creativity, by revisiting Great Expectations trans-artistically, through an odd combination of the pictorial, the musical, the cinematographic and the theatrical. This curious mixture of genres turns narration into fictionalized artistic performance, devised as a paean to the English tradition. At the other end of the spectrum, more iconoclastic literary experiments may be seen as bearing witness to Dickens’s off-the-beaten-track approach to novel-writing. Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, by juxtaposing disjointed jump-cut sequences incorporating fantasy, personal statements and plagiarism transforms Dickensian theatrical performance into “narrative happenings”. As for Rushdie, the few pages he dedicates to Our Mutual Friend in his Satanic Verses capitalize on Dickens’s histrionic exuberance to stun the reader through verbal fireworks.","PeriodicalId":41197,"journal":{"name":"CAHIERS VICTORIENS & EDOUARDIENS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85201405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}