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John Evelyn Barlas, A Critical Biography:
Poetry, Anarchism, and Mental Illness in Late-Victorian Britain by Philip Cohen This comprehensive critical biography of John Evelyn Barlas (1860-1914) draws heavily on unpublished materials. He produced some distinguished verse in the Aesthetic and Decadent modes, emphasizing withdrawal, contemplation, and the life of the imagination. Yet in seeming contradiction, he also engaged actively in radical politics. And he spent the last 20 years of his life in a mental institution. Although this book stresses Barlas’s literary output and associations, his political thought and activities are also discussed in the context of late-Victorian radicalism. And the author addresses the legal aspects of mental illness in late-Victorian Britain, as well as its diagnosis and treatment at the time. Against this background, he discusses Barlas’s illness, based on extensive case records. Cohen also offers an account of Barlas’s publishing history and a comprehensive descriptive bibliography of his works. Barlas’s friends included Oscar Wilde, Robert Harborough Sherard, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, John Davidson, Lionel Johnson, and Morley Roberts. In the process of replacing the sparse and inaccurate Barlas Legend with a detailed, factual account of his life, the author presents new information about his friends and associates. Hardbound: 15.6 x 23.4 cm., 374 pp. ISBN 1 904201 21 2 £40.0 / $65.00 More information |
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'Guy Thorne': C. Ranger Gull Edwardian Tabloid Novelist and His Unseemly Brotherhood by David Wilkinson Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull [1875-1923] has proved to be an emblematic ’Nineties decadent whose early works were published anonymously and banned from the circulating libraries. Compton Mackenzie tells us that those early novels created a scandal that compared with the ‘four letter school’ of the 1960s. In 1906 his books were removed from the shelves at Oxford University. He was not above pulling the odd scam. The publisher Grant Richards decided he was ‘an odd, attractive and rather unprincipled little chap.’ He was an alcoholic and a gambler who placed himself perilously close to Oscar Wilde. Two companies in which he was involved went into liquidation. Through his friendships he became embroiled in the sub rosa world of late Victorian pornography. Hardbound: 15.6 x 23.4 cm., 335 pp. ISBN 1 904201 20 5 £40.0 / $65.00 More information |
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Horae Amoris: The Collected Poems of Rosa Newmarch edited with an introductory essay by John Holmes and Natasha Distiller Rosa Newmarch (1857-1940), the influential musicologist and Russian scholar, was the first truly queer poet in English Literature. In her powerful and moving poetry, she explores desire and social politics, negotiating the rules of gender at a time when modern sexual identities were just beginning to take shape. For the first time, this edition gathers together all Newmarch’s poetry, including occasional pieces not found in her published collections and her admired translations from the Russian poets. The editors provide a detailed Introduction and Notes demonstrating the striking interrelations of poetic influences, gender indeterminacy and same-sex desire, classical music, and Russian culture within Newmarch’s extraordinary and overlooked poetry. Hardbound: 15.9 x 23.5 cm., 293 pp. ISBN 1 904201 19 9 £40.0 / $65.00 More information |
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Two Tombeaux to Oscar Wilde:
Jean Cocteau’s Le Portrait Surnaturel
de Dorian Gray and
Raymond Laurent’s essay
on Wildean Asthetics A bilingual presentation of the texts, edited and translated by Emily Eells It cannot be often that the first dramatic work of an author, artist and film-maker with as distinguished a career ahead of him as Jean Cocteau (1891-1963) should lie unstudied and unperformed for so long. All the more so as the play in question is none other than a creative dramatization of Oscar Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In her introduction to this critical edition Emily Eells provides a fascinating and convincing explanation as to why Cocteau consigned Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray to oblivion. The answer is to be found in the tragically foreshortened life of Raymond Laurent (1886-1908), whose essay on Oscar Wilde is more than a period piece. This volume brings it out from its hiding place behind the uncut pages of the only copy in the French library network. Through the comparative study of Cocteau and Laurent’s works, we enter the underground reception of Wilde in France and measure the intensity of aestheticism in Anglo-French cultural exchange. Hardbound: 15.9 x 23.5 cm., 251 pp. ISBN 1 904201 18 2 £40.0 / $65.00 More information |
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