Patricia Pulham

Catherine Maxwell

Focusing on the work of the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, this collection offers a wide range of critical writings that reflect the diversity of Lee's own interests. Organized in a broadly chronological order these essays examine key pieces in Lee's oeuvre, offering original approaches to a number of Lee's works including Euphorion, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, Prince Albert and the Lady Snake, Louis Norbert, The Ballet of the Nations, The Handling of Words, and Music and Its Lovers. The book will also shed new light on Lee's relationship with contemporaries such as her brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, her friend and mentor Walter Pater, and the art historian and fellow intellectual Bernard Berenson.

Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics

Vernon Lee

Rosario Arias

"Examining works by writers including Michle Roberts, Michael Faber and A.S. Byatt, this collection highlights the pervasive presence of the Victorian past in neo-Victorian novels through the tropes of haunting and spectrality, parallelling a renewed interest in the impact of the supernatural and the occult on Victorian individuals"--Provided by publisher.

possessing the past

Haunting and spectrality in neo-Victorian fiction

Patricia Pulham combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism in her study of Vernon Lee's fantastic tales. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, Pulham argues that the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales

Jane Ford

Kim Edwards Keates

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of ‘needs’ to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siècle studies more generally.

Libidinal Lives

Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle

In her persuasively argued study, Patricia Pulham astutely combines psychoanalytic theory with socio-historical criticism to examine a selection of fantastic tales by the female aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). Lee's own definition of the supernatural in the preface to Hauntings questions the nature of the 'genuine ghost', and argues that this figure is not found in the Society of Psychical Research but in our own psyches, where it functions as a mediator between past and present. Using D.W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory, which maintains that adults transfer their childhood engagement with toys to art and cultural artifacts, Pulham argues that the prevalence of the past in Lee's tales signifies not only an historical but a psychic past. Thus the 'ghosts' that haunt Lee's supernatural fiction, as well as her aesthetic, psychological, and historical writings, held complex meanings for her that were fundamental to her intellectual development and allowed her to explore alternative identities that permit the expression of transgressive sexualities.

Patricia Pulham

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