Mark Sandy

Kostas Boyiopoulos

Anthony Patterson

The 17 essays of Unsettling Presences investigate writers and texts chiefly stretching from 1890 to 1939, from both within and outside of the Modernist canon. They explore tensions, convergences, and differences between the dominant Modernists and lesser-known figures. Not only do they examine the alternative vision of populist writers such as Wells and Bennett, but also discuss figures who flirt both with cultural elitism and realism, such as E. M. Forster. More importantly, they showcase the work of obscure authors on the cultural fringe and/or of popular culture for the first time (e.g. Lord Dunsany and Margery Allingham, etc). The chapters cover cases on revising and recasting the tradition (Romanticism, Victorian Realism, and Aestheticism), cultural dialogues and comparisons. The genres and forms discussed include Realist fiction, lyric poetry, Symbolist drama, critical essay, heroic fantasy, popular and detective fiction, epistolary writing, parody, detective fiction, and painting. The chapters come to life and indeed cohere into a formidable whole with high-brow literary Modernism serving as the golden standard or point of reference against which the voices/texts being discussed are measured.

Unsettling Presences

Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism

This book examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson.

The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson

Decadent Image

For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914

This wide-ranging anthology showcases for the first time the short story as the most attractive genre for British writers who experimented with Decadent themes and styles. The selections represent the important role that magazine culture played in th

Kostas Boyiopoulos

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