Books by Koenraad Claes
The Late-Victorian Little Magazine, 2018
Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-gard... more Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated designs or total works of art in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen major little magazines of the Victorian era, both situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative items, in doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.
Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine
Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions
Articles & chapters by Koenraad Claes
Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences (ed. by Kostas Boyiopoulos, Anthony Patterson and Mark Sandy), 2019
The ambiguous representation of the Tory political beliefs of Parade's End's anti-hero Christophe... more The ambiguous representation of the Tory political beliefs of Parade's End's anti-hero Christopher Tietjens has given rise to debates about the stance on conservative politics implied in the novel, as has been amply discussed by scholars such as Andrzej Gasiorek, Robert Green and Max Saunders. This essay argues that such ambiguity had already been an inherent aspect of major nineteenth-century novels by Sir Walter Scott, Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward that explicitly work out conservative ideologies in ages of socio-political transition, and through borrowing narrative structures and stock characters from these politically conservative novelists, Ford delivers a politically revisionist and narratively modernist pastiche of nineteenth-century Toryism and literary conventions for his own age. These intertextual references suggest that instead of it being a refutation of Tory doctrines, Parade’s End’s links to conservative discourse may actually run deeper than is apparent at first glance.
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690-1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century (ed. by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell), 2018
Victorian Periodicals Review, 2017
As Linda Peterson has demonstrated, the British periodical press after the Napoleonic Wars incorp... more As Linda Peterson has demonstrated, the British periodical press after the Napoleonic Wars incorporated new authorial identities that aided authors in the development of their careers. Notably, influential women authors seized upon these innovations as an opportunity to gain recognition as legitimate participants in the literary field, what Bourdieu has called "consecration." This article examines a pioneering women's periodical of the preceding period, the Lady's Magazine, arguing that it had already modestly aided in the consecration of female authorship by means of inclusive editorial policies that would become problematic in the early nineteenth century.
Charles Dickens and the Mid-Victorian Press, 2013
Scottish Literary Review, 2012
Victorian Periodicals Review, Jan 1, 2010
English Studies, Jan 1, 2010
The two most prominent Aestheticist or Decadent literary magazines in the 1890s were the Yellow B... more The two most prominent Aestheticist or Decadent literary magazines in the 1890s were the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Both arguably drew inspiration from the coterie publication the Dial, which for the first time brought together the eclectic sources of their editorial aesthetic. The later ...
Book reviews by Koenraad Claes
Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture 1780-1840, 2017
TS-> Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies / Journal for the Study of Periodical Media 38 (December... more TS-> Tijdschrift voor Tijdschriftstudies / Journal for the Study of Periodical Media 38 (December 2015), pp. 87-89
Victorian Periodicals Review 48.3 (2015): 437-439.
Spiegel der Letteren, 55.2 (2013)
Presentations & talks by Koenraad Claes
As an alleged martyr to the closemindedness of his own age, John Keats’s reputation as a great Ro... more As an alleged martyr to the closemindedness of his own age, John Keats’s reputation as a great Romantic was nothing if not belated. Even after his posthumous consecration he was for decades read reductively as a naïve sensualist, ironically echoing his early detractors. For instance to Matthew Arnold, ‘by his promise, at any rate, if not fully by his performance’, Keats was ‘one of the very greatest of English poets’, but the fulfilment of that promise had never been guaranteed: perhaps he had been a ‘merely sensuous man’, who ‘cannot either by promise or by performance be a very great poet, because poetry interprets life’. The Grecian Urn creed that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and ye need to know’ was early on identified as a central principle for Keats, but it was denigrated as a chiastic truism seeking to validate an escapist flight from the positive thought of which the self-taught poet would have been incapable, to the near-instinctive negative capability of mere affect. ‘No, it is not all’, objected Arnold.
In the late Victorian era, several of the first British avant-garde formations came to admire Keats’s outsider status, this time without social condescension. His controversial sensualism was now appreciated artistically as an innovative mimesis of materiality, famously influencing the so-called ‘fleshly school’ and their numerous progeny. In this paper, I will investigate two little-known instances in which Keats’s equation of Beauty and Truth received an even wider interpretation at the end of the century. In his Life of John Keats (1880), former PRB theorist William Michael Rossetti discusses the ‘universal application’ of the axiom, and implies that it may be a key to the elusive mimetic principle of ‘truth to nature’ that the Pre-Raphaelites pursued in their literary as well as their pictorial output. Soon after, this interartistic Keatsian aesthetic was politicised by the burgeoning Arts & Crafts Movement. In the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft’s little magazine the Quest (1894–6) Beautiful Truth / Truthful Beauty is evoked to describe a desired identity of production and conception, or material medium (craft) and ideal message (art), that would constitute the mission of the artistic craftsman.
By analysing these two afterlives of the belated great Romantic, I will show that in the late Victorian era Keats’s central creed was treasured for the knowledge it can bring us about the world, exactly opposite to the narrow escapist interpretation favoured by his own contemporaries.
Because of a pro-modernist bias that scholarship has only begun correcting since the 1980s, the t... more Because of a pro-modernist bias that scholarship has only begun correcting since the 1980s, the term ‘avant-garde’ has been almost solely associated with the angry manifestos of the First World War and Interbellum, and ‘little magazines’ would by definition too be characterized by bellicose declarations that all cultural production older than last year was ready for the bin. However, the three earliest, Victorian examples of the little magazine genre—the Germ, the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine and the Century Guild Hobby Horse—occupied a position in the literary field that can without any reservations be called avant-garde, and even by the definitions suggested by modernism-centric theorists such as Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. Before recognizable alternative networks of artist, authors, publishers and printers took shape, these Victorian little magazines helped consolidate these avant-garde constellations, and made it possible for an avant-garde position to exist in the first place. In short, in the Victorian era the little magazine was not just the periodical mouthpiece of avant-garde movements; the little magazine was the heterotopian (cf. Foucault) site in and through which avant-gardes functioned.
It is common knowledge that the principles of Young England were publicised through literary text... more It is common knowledge that the principles of Young England were publicised through literary texts, their leader Disraeli’s ‘Young England trilogy’ of novels (1844–47) often being considered the group’s first public mission statements. However, their actual first published pleas for a renewal of British conservatism through a return to its historical Tory legacy were not novels, but poems, and by younger associates instead of by the future PM himself. Already in 1841, two of Dizzy’s core supporters, Lord John Manners (later Duke of Rutland) and Alexander ‘the Celt’ Baillie-Cochrane (a Scottish stray in Young England), published long poems that combine a purposeful idealisation of the past with an awareness of the challenges of the early Victorian era. As ‘the Celt’ would later recall, ‘[a]ll the Young Englanders were in some degree poetic’.
Baillie’s /Meditations of Other Days/ is a programmatic poem that shed light on the origins of Young England ideology, then as now often denigrated as mere historical pageantry. This paper argues that this poem actually develop nuanced arguments informed by Romantic poetics and philosophy of history, mainly pertaining to what Disraeli summarised as ‘imagination in the government of nations as a quality not less important than reason’.
The /Meditations/ conform to the late theorist Svetlana Boym’s description of the political project of the ‘restorative’ nostalgic, who ‘directs his [sic] gaze not only backwards but sideways’, lamenting unrealized but potentially renewable historical continuities between past and present, ‘and expresses himself in elegiac poems and ironic fragments, not in philosophical or scientific treatises’. Their intrinsically modern patchwork of references to outmoded norms, in which ‘reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together’, arguably constitutes an early instance of what Boym called the ‘Off-Modern’, serving to expose the pretentiousness of a century and a half of modernity. Reading these poems in this light will elucidate Young England’s early instance of a seemingly paradoxical—yet typically Victorian—appropriation of defunct realities in order to resolve acute social issues.
Focusing on three Victorian little magazines—The Germ (1850), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884... more Focusing on three Victorian little magazines—The Germ (1850), the Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884/86–94) and the Quest (1894–96)—this lecture argued for the importance of these journals in establishing an avant-garde position in Britain, decades before the modernist period with which this counterculture is commonly associated. It shows how these periodicals through their contents, material aspects and distribution practices proposed alternatives to the logic of an antagonized mainstream, and by proving the feasibility of their own alternative, they constituted heteropian (see Foucault) spaces in and through which the avant-garde could first come to fruition.
While it is common knowledge that Disraeli popularized the principles of his Young England factio... more While it is common knowledge that Disraeli popularized the principles of his Young England faction through his novels of the mid-1840s, it is less known that the earliest literary-political interventions of this group were in fact poems. In this paper, I will discuss how early poetry by the Young England group works out rudimentary historical philosophies to suggest patterns throughout European political history that were meant to inform policy in their Victorian present. Before the appearance of Coningsby (1844), his associates Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie-Cochrane and George Smythe articulated their conservative-reformist views in poetry that mirrored the conflicts of their days in heroic/tragic historical precedents, and the future PM himself had started gathering his thoughts in verse before he had even entered parliament.
As the historian J.C.D. Clark has noted, ‘[u]ntil after 1789 the term “revolution” […] often signified a reversion to a previous pattern, as a wheel comes full circle’. Even decades later, Benjamin Disraeli’s Revolutionary Epick (1834), a poem that made it to 3600 lines but was planned to be ten times as long, despite its title was obviously not a call for violent reform either. Rather, it was to be an explanation of how Europe since the Early Modern era had come to be defined by a conflict between the ‘rival Genii’ of ‘Feudalism’ (or established authority) and ‘Federalism’ (or democracy), which would need to be resolved by means of a rejuvenating return to older forms. When read in the light of his later campaign for class appeasement and what has been referred to as ‘Tory democracy’, this poem can shed light on the late-Romantic phase of Disraeli’s literary authorship, and his engagement with the political philosophy of the day.
It is the scholarly consensus that Sir Walter Scott’s plot device of the “middling hero”, whose c... more It is the scholarly consensus that Sir Walter Scott’s plot device of the “middling hero”, whose character development represented a consensus between an obsolete reactionary position and a new-fangled progressivist position, was meant to inspire an appeasement of both class struggle and of ethnic differences across Britain. Through this means, Scott managed to introduce his forward-looking yet fundamentally conservative message to a politically broad readership. This purported neutrality has intrigued commentators from the radical William Hazlitt onwards, who in The Spirit of the Age (1825) grudgingly praised the artistic merits of Scott’s novels while warning all the more of his “political demerits”. This paper will argue that this “political” aspect may be taken more literally than is often supposed, as the resolution of Scott’s agonistic plots tends to resemble rhetorical commonplaces in Tory party-political discourse.
As Andrew Lincoln has pointed out, Scott’s plots were informed by a tradition of Enlightenment “Tory scepticism” that favoured the political status quo but did not evade then developing relativist notions on the historical stability of governmental, social and religious institutions. Hume is often cited in this context, but there were more straightforwardly Tory precedents. After being compromised for his involvement in the Fifteen, the once powerful Tory statesman Lord Bolingbroke attempted to sell a pragmatic alliance between disaffected Tories and “Country Whigs” who too were critical of Walpole’s “Court Whig” regime. He decried an entrenched factionalism that would have caused “contests” which “brought even the fundamental principles of our constitution into question”, and theorized about a “Patriot King” capable of “reuniting his subject in a willing unforced submission”. Decades later, “Liberal Tory” George Canning, to whom Scott lent journalistic support, also “consider[ed] it to be the duty of a British statesman [...] to hold a middle course between extremes”. So doing, Canning created a new Tory party out of the loyalist Whig faction consolidated during the French Revolution. Both campaigns amounted to a revisionist strategy to reinstate the marginalized Tories in the challenging political climates of the early Hanoverian era and the Age of Revolutions.
By discussing traces of such pragmatic Tory strategies in the novels and historical writings of Scott, this paper will add to our understanding of the relationship between Scott’s political activism and his literary production.
In her study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Mary Poovey claimed that women’s magazi... more In her study The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (1984), Mary Poovey claimed that women’s magazines during the tumultuous 1790s shielded their readers from the supposedly corrupting influence of politics, then considered the prerogative of men. While women’s periodicals did indeed not cover topical events with the same level of scrutiny as male-gendered periodicals, a closer look at the best-selling Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832) and its major competitor the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798-1832) reveals that these titles in this period did not consistently present “a reassuring picture of stability and continuity”. Both included items that were directly relevant to the Revolution Controversy and the ongoing wars with France, and suggest a cautiously partisan view on these crises that manifests itself in featured original contributions as well as in the selection of extracts from the most controversial polemical works of the day. The Lady’s Magazine, issued by reformist publisher George Robinson, for instance excerpted such outspoken radicals as Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams, and even Thomas Paine throughout the 1790s. The Lady’s Monthly Museum, conversely, invoked counter-revolutionary powerhouse Hannah More from the opening item of its first number, and explicitly urged its readers to identify with the political status quo. By focusing on case studies from their respective contents, this paper will add to recent scholarship arguing that these late eighteenth-century women’s magazines—contrary to earlier reductive readings—did in fact involve their "fair readers" in the world outside the domestic sphere in the decade of the Revolution.
This paper considered the British Aestheticist little magazines the /Century Guild Hobby Horse/ a... more This paper considered the British Aestheticist little magazines the /Century Guild Hobby Horse/ and its successor the /Hobby Horse/ as two seperate publications with their own ideological and commercial agendas, in order to clarify the distinct roles each played in the popularization of Aestheticist canons of applied art, especially in book design.
Uploads
Books by Koenraad Claes
Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine
Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions
Articles & chapters by Koenraad Claes
Book reviews by Koenraad Claes
Presentations & talks by Koenraad Claes
In the late Victorian era, several of the first British avant-garde formations came to admire Keats’s outsider status, this time without social condescension. His controversial sensualism was now appreciated artistically as an innovative mimesis of materiality, famously influencing the so-called ‘fleshly school’ and their numerous progeny. In this paper, I will investigate two little-known instances in which Keats’s equation of Beauty and Truth received an even wider interpretation at the end of the century. In his Life of John Keats (1880), former PRB theorist William Michael Rossetti discusses the ‘universal application’ of the axiom, and implies that it may be a key to the elusive mimetic principle of ‘truth to nature’ that the Pre-Raphaelites pursued in their literary as well as their pictorial output. Soon after, this interartistic Keatsian aesthetic was politicised by the burgeoning Arts & Crafts Movement. In the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft’s little magazine the Quest (1894–6) Beautiful Truth / Truthful Beauty is evoked to describe a desired identity of production and conception, or material medium (craft) and ideal message (art), that would constitute the mission of the artistic craftsman.
By analysing these two afterlives of the belated great Romantic, I will show that in the late Victorian era Keats’s central creed was treasured for the knowledge it can bring us about the world, exactly opposite to the narrow escapist interpretation favoured by his own contemporaries.
Baillie’s /Meditations of Other Days/ is a programmatic poem that shed light on the origins of Young England ideology, then as now often denigrated as mere historical pageantry. This paper argues that this poem actually develop nuanced arguments informed by Romantic poetics and philosophy of history, mainly pertaining to what Disraeli summarised as ‘imagination in the government of nations as a quality not less important than reason’.
The /Meditations/ conform to the late theorist Svetlana Boym’s description of the political project of the ‘restorative’ nostalgic, who ‘directs his [sic] gaze not only backwards but sideways’, lamenting unrealized but potentially renewable historical continuities between past and present, ‘and expresses himself in elegiac poems and ironic fragments, not in philosophical or scientific treatises’. Their intrinsically modern patchwork of references to outmoded norms, in which ‘reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together’, arguably constitutes an early instance of what Boym called the ‘Off-Modern’, serving to expose the pretentiousness of a century and a half of modernity. Reading these poems in this light will elucidate Young England’s early instance of a seemingly paradoxical—yet typically Victorian—appropriation of defunct realities in order to resolve acute social issues.
As the historian J.C.D. Clark has noted, ‘[u]ntil after 1789 the term “revolution” […] often signified a reversion to a previous pattern, as a wheel comes full circle’. Even decades later, Benjamin Disraeli’s Revolutionary Epick (1834), a poem that made it to 3600 lines but was planned to be ten times as long, despite its title was obviously not a call for violent reform either. Rather, it was to be an explanation of how Europe since the Early Modern era had come to be defined by a conflict between the ‘rival Genii’ of ‘Feudalism’ (or established authority) and ‘Federalism’ (or democracy), which would need to be resolved by means of a rejuvenating return to older forms. When read in the light of his later campaign for class appeasement and what has been referred to as ‘Tory democracy’, this poem can shed light on the late-Romantic phase of Disraeli’s literary authorship, and his engagement with the political philosophy of the day.
As Andrew Lincoln has pointed out, Scott’s plots were informed by a tradition of Enlightenment “Tory scepticism” that favoured the political status quo but did not evade then developing relativist notions on the historical stability of governmental, social and religious institutions. Hume is often cited in this context, but there were more straightforwardly Tory precedents. After being compromised for his involvement in the Fifteen, the once powerful Tory statesman Lord Bolingbroke attempted to sell a pragmatic alliance between disaffected Tories and “Country Whigs” who too were critical of Walpole’s “Court Whig” regime. He decried an entrenched factionalism that would have caused “contests” which “brought even the fundamental principles of our constitution into question”, and theorized about a “Patriot King” capable of “reuniting his subject in a willing unforced submission”. Decades later, “Liberal Tory” George Canning, to whom Scott lent journalistic support, also “consider[ed] it to be the duty of a British statesman [...] to hold a middle course between extremes”. So doing, Canning created a new Tory party out of the loyalist Whig faction consolidated during the French Revolution. Both campaigns amounted to a revisionist strategy to reinstate the marginalized Tories in the challenging political climates of the early Hanoverian era and the Age of Revolutions.
By discussing traces of such pragmatic Tory strategies in the novels and historical writings of Scott, this paper will add to our understanding of the relationship between Scott’s political activism and his literary production.
Key Features:
----------------------
* First monograph to focus on the origins and development of the little magazine genre during the Victorian period
* Each chapter provides a representative introduction to the respective little magazines
* Combines new insights with a critical overview of the state of the art on each discussed little magazine
Table of contents
----------------------------
Introduction
1. The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine
2. Mounting the (Century Guild) Hobby Horse
3. The Little Magazine as a Periodical Portfolio: the Dial, the Pagan Review and the Page
4. Selling the Yellow Nineties: the Yellow Book and the Savoy
5. Politicised Aestheticism outside London: the Quest and the Evergreen
6. Little Excursions Outside the Avant-Garde: the Pageant, the Parade and the Dome
(In)conclusions
In the late Victorian era, several of the first British avant-garde formations came to admire Keats’s outsider status, this time without social condescension. His controversial sensualism was now appreciated artistically as an innovative mimesis of materiality, famously influencing the so-called ‘fleshly school’ and their numerous progeny. In this paper, I will investigate two little-known instances in which Keats’s equation of Beauty and Truth received an even wider interpretation at the end of the century. In his Life of John Keats (1880), former PRB theorist William Michael Rossetti discusses the ‘universal application’ of the axiom, and implies that it may be a key to the elusive mimetic principle of ‘truth to nature’ that the Pre-Raphaelites pursued in their literary as well as their pictorial output. Soon after, this interartistic Keatsian aesthetic was politicised by the burgeoning Arts & Crafts Movement. In the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft’s little magazine the Quest (1894–6) Beautiful Truth / Truthful Beauty is evoked to describe a desired identity of production and conception, or material medium (craft) and ideal message (art), that would constitute the mission of the artistic craftsman.
By analysing these two afterlives of the belated great Romantic, I will show that in the late Victorian era Keats’s central creed was treasured for the knowledge it can bring us about the world, exactly opposite to the narrow escapist interpretation favoured by his own contemporaries.
Baillie’s /Meditations of Other Days/ is a programmatic poem that shed light on the origins of Young England ideology, then as now often denigrated as mere historical pageantry. This paper argues that this poem actually develop nuanced arguments informed by Romantic poetics and philosophy of history, mainly pertaining to what Disraeli summarised as ‘imagination in the government of nations as a quality not less important than reason’.
The /Meditations/ conform to the late theorist Svetlana Boym’s description of the political project of the ‘restorative’ nostalgic, who ‘directs his [sic] gaze not only backwards but sideways’, lamenting unrealized but potentially renewable historical continuities between past and present, ‘and expresses himself in elegiac poems and ironic fragments, not in philosophical or scientific treatises’. Their intrinsically modern patchwork of references to outmoded norms, in which ‘reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together’, arguably constitutes an early instance of what Boym called the ‘Off-Modern’, serving to expose the pretentiousness of a century and a half of modernity. Reading these poems in this light will elucidate Young England’s early instance of a seemingly paradoxical—yet typically Victorian—appropriation of defunct realities in order to resolve acute social issues.
As the historian J.C.D. Clark has noted, ‘[u]ntil after 1789 the term “revolution” […] often signified a reversion to a previous pattern, as a wheel comes full circle’. Even decades later, Benjamin Disraeli’s Revolutionary Epick (1834), a poem that made it to 3600 lines but was planned to be ten times as long, despite its title was obviously not a call for violent reform either. Rather, it was to be an explanation of how Europe since the Early Modern era had come to be defined by a conflict between the ‘rival Genii’ of ‘Feudalism’ (or established authority) and ‘Federalism’ (or democracy), which would need to be resolved by means of a rejuvenating return to older forms. When read in the light of his later campaign for class appeasement and what has been referred to as ‘Tory democracy’, this poem can shed light on the late-Romantic phase of Disraeli’s literary authorship, and his engagement with the political philosophy of the day.
As Andrew Lincoln has pointed out, Scott’s plots were informed by a tradition of Enlightenment “Tory scepticism” that favoured the political status quo but did not evade then developing relativist notions on the historical stability of governmental, social and religious institutions. Hume is often cited in this context, but there were more straightforwardly Tory precedents. After being compromised for his involvement in the Fifteen, the once powerful Tory statesman Lord Bolingbroke attempted to sell a pragmatic alliance between disaffected Tories and “Country Whigs” who too were critical of Walpole’s “Court Whig” regime. He decried an entrenched factionalism that would have caused “contests” which “brought even the fundamental principles of our constitution into question”, and theorized about a “Patriot King” capable of “reuniting his subject in a willing unforced submission”. Decades later, “Liberal Tory” George Canning, to whom Scott lent journalistic support, also “consider[ed] it to be the duty of a British statesman [...] to hold a middle course between extremes”. So doing, Canning created a new Tory party out of the loyalist Whig faction consolidated during the French Revolution. Both campaigns amounted to a revisionist strategy to reinstate the marginalized Tories in the challenging political climates of the early Hanoverian era and the Age of Revolutions.
By discussing traces of such pragmatic Tory strategies in the novels and historical writings of Scott, this paper will add to our understanding of the relationship between Scott’s political activism and his literary production.
A prime example of this phenomenon is the hand-printed Quest (1894-1896) issued by the Birmingham Guild of Handicraft, which can be considered a periodical analogue to the books of Morris’s contemporaneous Kelmscott Press. Though produced in one of the leading industrial cities in Britain, it featured articles on guild socialism and village architecture as well as medievalist literary contributions that were allegories of its aesthetic and political principles, decorated with engraved initials and illustrations that hark back to medieval manuscripts and the earliest printed books. This paper will show that the Quest’s anachronistic obsession with the idealized Middle Ages was an aesthetic statement meant to reinforce its political struggle against the flaws it found in late-Victorian society.
A general overview of the Lady’s Magazine (1770-1832), one of the first and longest-running women’s periodicals of all time, and of the activities and planned output of the Leverhulme Research Project at the University of Kent that is currently investigating the magazine’s authorship and contents through a detailed bibliographical, statistical and literary-critical analysis of the magazine, from its inception in 1770 until the launch of its new series in 1818. This talk focused on the research methodology of the research project and contextualized the Lady’s Magazine within the history of the women’s magazine genre and the wider British print culture of its time.
Throughout the four books, this ideological crisis is reflected in a bittersweet pastiche of quintessentially nineteenth-century literary modes and plot conventions. Ford, Victorian by birth but modernist both by choice and necessity, works out to what extent the literary legacy of a bygone age can or should be sustained in a period that at least wishes to be radically different. Ford’s lampooning of his Fin-de-Siècle roots has received ample attention, but his less obvious references to earlier Victorian novelists are as yet understudied. This is certainly true for two eminent Victorians who in their work too dealt with the necessity to adapt to new social realities, namely Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
In this paper, I read Parade’s End as the Last Post of the Victorian “Novel With A Purpose”. I will do this by demonstrating that the many explicit and implicit references to Disraeli and Ward provide clues to understanding several key aspects of the novel, above all the ideological dialectic between Tory Tietjens and his suffragette love interest Valentine Wannop.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Authorship across and within diverse languages, literatures, and geographical locations: colonial, transatlantic, transnational, translated, polyglot.
- Varieties of authors: dramatists, novelists, poets, journalists, sages, critics, humorists; authors as entertainers, public intellectuals, moralists.
- Authenticity, authority, agency, attribution.
- Authorship and the canon.
- Gender and authorship: interrogating putative "feminine" and "masculine" models of writing, self-fashioning, and getting published.
- Fame, infame, disfame, lack of fame; the self-creation, branding and reception of authors.
- Anonymity, pseudonymity, and authorial personae.
- Authors and collaboration; single and multiple authors. Authors and cultural networks.
- The quotidian activities of writers as they relate to the public image of authors.
- Translation, editing, redacting, and reviewing considered as kinds of authorial performances.
- Authorship and the marketplace; authors and patrons; authorship and intellectual property.
- The textual re-creation of authors by editors, publishers, and printers.
- Authorship and/in the material book; authorship & new technologies (film, digital media, the internet).