Vernon Lee: Slow Serialist and Journalist at the Fin de Siècle

To expand understanding of imbricated journalism and high aestheticism at the fin de siècle, this essay examines Vernon Lee's journalism and slow essay serials, a form spread over space (viz., different periodicals) and marked by irregular temporal issue of installments before finding new cohesion when retroactively constructed as a book. Lee's prolific periodical publication, especially her aesthetic criticism, is rarely approached as journalism. Newly available letters and Lee's negotiations with editors clarify the occluded history of Lee's journalism and her slow essay serials, a distinctive serial form at the fin de siècle, which this article conceptualizes in closing.

Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography

The Dictionary of National Biography, published between 1885 and 1900, was one of Britain's biggest cyclopedia projects. The rampant expansion of the nation's archives, private collections, and museums produced an abundance of materials that frustrated the dictionary's editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, especially because methodologies for making order of such materials were underdeveloped. Adding to their frustration was the sense of impending doom felt generally in Britain after the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics in 1859. Entropy put an end to the presiding belief in the infinite energy that fueled Britain's economic development and therefore challenged Victorian biography's premise that the capacity for self-development was boundless. Like the physicists of the era, these dictionary makers searched for ways to circumvent entropy's deadening force and reenergize their world. This project would not actually be achieved, however, until the twentieth century when Claude Shannon published his “Information Theory” in 1948. I argue that in an attempt to get out from under the chaos of information overload, the editors of the DNB invented new methods to organize information that anticipated Shannon's revolutionary theory and changed the way that we think, write, and work.

Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices in Teleny

While music often appears as a “code” for sexual desire in Victorian literature, this article explores music's presence in a text for which no veiled language was needed: the anonymously published pornographic novella Teleny (1893). The authors of Teleny invoke emerging scientific discourses about music physiology to draw explicit parallels between musical and sexual encounters—as when the protagonist Camille orgasms in response to the vibrations of his lover's piano music. In such moments, Teleny offers an insistent defense of queer desire as a natural process rooted in the organic and often involuntary actions of the muscles and nerves—a particularly powerful intervention at a time when sexual “inversion” was most often denigrated as unnatural. In its use of biological science in the service of sexual representation—science that many twenty-first-century queer theorists might deem “essentialist”—Teleny presents a compelling challenge to scholars grappling with conversations about normativity, resistance, utopian desires, and idealized cultural objects.

“A Sigh of Sympathy”: Thomas Hardy's Paralinguistic Aesthetics and Evolutionary Sympathy

This essay turns on a quiet, though intriguing, expression—the sigh—and considers the aesthetic work that it performs in the novels of Thomas Hardy. While the primary focus of the essay is the aesthetic, communicative, and biological functions of the sigh itself, the broader imperative is to demonstrate how paralanguage was implicated in broader nineteenth-century debates about evolution. It does this by setting Hardy's sighs in conversation with Herbert Spencer's essay “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857). Hardy's writing dramatizes a comparable associative relationship between paralanguage, listening, and sympathy to that which Spencer proposed in “The Origin” but does not replicate the ideological conditions of Spencer's model, which had reserved the highest forms of sympathy for the “cultivated” few. Hardy's aesthetic interest in the sigh, I argue, is more overtly related to how the biosemiotics of paralanguage communicate insights into emotional conditions that are outside the grasp of language.

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

The Geopolitics of Decadence

The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).

Victorians in the Closet: Oscar Wilde's Monstrous Hollywood Legacy

This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagination and cinematic horror. It sketches the inherently cinematic qualities in decadent writing and, focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), offers a new reading of how it incorporates different cinematic technologies to create a sense of supernatural horror. The essay goes on to examine how Wilde's novel inspired early American horror films, with close analysis of how its dialogue and visual effects were incorporated into the genre-defining adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde (1920).

Decadence and Realism

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

On the Politics of Decadent Rebellion: Beardsley, Japonisme, Rococo

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.

The Lie of the Land: Decadence, Ecology, and Arboreal Communications

Focusing on Vernon Lee's and Algernon Blackwood's portrayals of forests, this article argues that decadent ecology questions the privileging of humans over other sentient beings in relation to the moral conscriptions intending to channel attachments and desires toward productivist purposes. It addresses the ways in which these authors undermine human assumptions of self-control and managerial authority by encouraging an opening up to the affective communications of ecosystems. Raising questions central to eco-studies in general, Lee's and Blackwood's works challenge ideas of human communicative superiority and extensionism through representations of humility, trepidatious veneration, and a sense of the imagination as a potential channel for affection across species.