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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: 15.9 x 23.5 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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That Way Madness Lies: Max Nordau on Fin-de-Siècle Genius
by Hans-Peter Söder The intent of this first major English-language volume on Max Nordau's critique of Modernism is to contextualize one of the most popular books of the Fin de Siècle, Max Nordau`s Degeneration. Max Nordau was chiefly responsible for giving the period the negative connotation that rests with it to the present day. Degeneration was the first of three classic text on what we now call Decadence, and between 1890 and 1900 it was one of Europe´s ten bestselling books. But how did it come about that one of the most sensitive literary critics of the time came to dismiss its genius? In analyzing the cultural critiques of the now little-known and seldom-read philosopher Max Nordau, this intellectual biography explicitly shifts attention away from canonized and frequently cannibalized fin-de-siècle authors. Max Nordau's international popularity in his own time is an indication that his concerns for the direction of Modernist culture resonated with his readers. Once Degeneration is seen in its fin-de-siècle context, Max Nordau`s willingness to take on the greatest literary reputations of the late nineteenth century, and his attempt to quench Walter Pater´s famous "hard and gem-like flame" of Decadence appears in a different light. Hardbound: 15.9 x 23.5 cm., 260 pp., illustrated. ISBN 1 904201 17 5 £40.0 / $65.00 More information |
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