Bosworth Field: a battlefield rediscovered?

The Bosworth Project concluded that the deciding battle in The Wars of the Roses was fought entirely at Fenn Lane and the site proposed is the only feasible candidate. However, the authors suggest that the narrative provided overlooks or downplays key aspects of contemporaneous accounts to support those conclusions. It is instead proposed that the primary site of battle was in a nearby location and an alternative narrative is offered that matches more of, and better accommodates, the contemporary accounts of battle events

Preface

This issue is the second to be focused on a single figure. Our inaugural issue published in 2018 was dedicated to Arthur Symons and now, four years later, we are delighted to be able to devote the current issue to another prolific and versatile writer and critic, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935). As Patricia Pulham and Sally Blackburn-Daniels acknowledge in their guest-editors’ Introduction, scholarship on Lee has grown in leaps and bounds over the last twenty years and Lee is now accessible to ‘a whole new generation of readers and students and prompting scholarship not only on her fiction but on other genres in which she wrote, as well as fictionalized versions of Lee in contemporary fiction’ (p. ii)

Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady

  Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady (Leipzig: Institut für Buchkunst, 2022) is a 72-page hard-cover graphic novel, and is an adaptation of Vernon Lee’s short story ‘Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady’, first published in volume 10 of The Yellow Book (July 1896). This short story was Lee’s only contribution to the magazine and utilizes gothic and decadent themes, such as possession, mythology, and the femme fatale in order to explore societal pressures, marginalization, and gender politics.   &nbsp

Review: Kristin Mahoney, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022)

Among Richard Bruce Nugent’s papers in the Beinecke Library, there are multiple manuscripts of a story about a half-Japanese, half-American gender-fluid individual who works as a geisha, has a sexual relationship with their father (first accidentally and then by conscious choice), and travels around Europe and North America in pursuit of physical pleasure and beautiful objects to collect. ‘Geisha Man’ never saw the light of day during Nugent’s lifetime. But the author’s daring plan for this decadent story was to bring it out as an impossibly elaborate art book, in which each page should have been printed on paper of a different colour, with different-coloured ink. The intriguing ‘Geisha Man’ is emblematic of the decadent corpus that Kristin Mahoney brings to light in her fascinating new book, Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. It is a corpus that is, like Nugent’s story, made of cosmopolitan connections and projections, attempts to fashion and unmake complex racial and gender identities, baffling hybrids of aestheticism and taboo

Preface

Almost ten years ago, in 2014, Goldsmiths organized a conference entitled ‘Decadence and the Senses’, which aimed to explore the decadent sensorium and its representation in literature and visual culture from classical to modern times. Decadent studies was an emerging field then, defining itself principally around literary studies, but a number of the conference papers were richly interdisciplinary. One such paper was Liz Renes’ on John Singer Sargent’s 1884 painting Madame X and the ‘aesthetics of sculptural corporeality’. She tantalized us with a discussion of how the decadent aesthetics of clothes and cosmetics disrupted Victorian conventions. Since then, however, despite the provocations of the 2014 conference and with the exception of a few interventions (including most recently Catherine Spooner’s essay on ‘Fashion: Decadent Stylings’ in the Oxford Handbook of Decadence), the worlds of decadence studies and fashion have seldom collided. It is with enormous and long-awaited pleasure therefore that Volupté is the platform for a selection of new critical and creative explorations on decadence, aestheticism, fashion, textiles, accessories, and cosmetics

‘They got it all wrong!’ – Victorian War Fiction and the First World War

Beginning with George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, invasion novels became a regular feature of late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. The article takes a closer look at the depiction of war in these texts from a military history point of view; it argues that they were not so far from reality as to render them useless to the military historian. Rather, they can be used to provide insights into how the authors and their audience thought about the great war that many expected to come within their lifetime

Which Translation?: Identifying the True Source of Patten Wilson’s Shahnameh Illustrations

Recent scholarship has stressed the influence of translation on late nineteenth-century literary and artistic developments (indeed, ‘Decadence and Translation’ was the theme of a Volupté special issue in 2020). Focusing on the British context, Annmarie Drury describes how English poetry at this time was ‘profoundly pervious, susceptible to historical-cultural currents arising from the territorial expansion and imperialist tensions that Britain experienced at the time’. Translators, in her phrase, ‘ministered to this susceptibility’, mediating foreign genres and prosodic forms that by their assimilation into anglophone literary culture both ‘tested’ and ‘transformed’ English poetry. Given the importance of translators at this time, and the potential ramifications of their decisions and methods in translation, an obvious question to ask when trying to gauge the reception of a single work of foreign literature by one individual British writer or artist is, ‘which translation were they using?’ Take the poetry of Sappho: until relatively recently, most translators of her ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ gendered the speaker’s beloved as male. But as early as 1835, the philologist Theodor Bergk proposed the opposite – a distinction of perhaps major significance for a contemporary reader into whose hands his translation happened to fall. Similarly, any scholar investigating a fin-de-siècle dramatist who was influenced by Ibsen is likely to consider which of the various English translations then available he or she consulted, and if both, then which was preferred. The subtle differences between Gosse’s and Archer’s versions are even the subject of a comic misunderstanding in J. M. Barrie’s 1891 farce, Ibsen’s Ghost, when it emerges that two characters in dialogue have been speaking their lines from variant play texts. If translational variants were conspicuous enough to be a subject for popular humour in the 1890s, then for us in the present they must be an object of serious enquiry

Re-purposing gun based anti-aircraft systems

Between the late 1960s and mid-1990s, American ground forces employed the Vulcan Air Defence System (VADS), for use against short range, aerial and ground targets. The VADS was mobile and comprised a radar and a six barrelled 20 mm autocannon, but this was soon found to be ineffective against fast aircraft at low altitudes. Despite being an old technology by 1982 an Israeli VADS downed a fighter jet and this is believed to be the only time in VADS operational history. This happened during the 1982 Israel – Lebanon war in the midst of intense ground combat and where the VADS helped unexpectedly. That event, the VADS withdrawal from operations in the 1990s, and their recent reappearance in use against drones are discussed

Review: Brad Evans, Ephemeral Bibelots: How an International Fad Buried American Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)

As the subtitle of Brad Evans’s Ephemeral Bibelots provocatively suggests, this is a book about some long-obscured origins of American Modernism, about the relationship between the American and the international, and about the faddishness of fin-de-siècle ephemeral bibelots that largely have been ignored in studies of the period. As such, this book deepens our understanding of modern periodical studies and of long Modernism as it recovers a transformative print-cultural moment

Fibres, Folds, and Trimmings: The Decadent Materials of Sarah Grand’s Emotional Moments

The emergence of the late Victorian ‘New Woman’ – a term popularized in a series of articles by Sarah Grand and Ouida, published in the North American Review in 1894 – has often been linked to fin-de-siècle sartorial discourses such as the rational dress movement and Aesthetic dress. ‘Rational’ ensembles inspired by menswear ‘allowed women physical and social mobility’ and were therefore an important means of expressing dissent towards Victorian gender ideologies.[i] By contrast, the connotations of Aesthetic or artistic dress, associated with ‘looseness and lack of structure, natural waist’ and ‘disavowal of the corset’, were less explicitly political.[ii] As Kimberly Wahl writes, Aesthetic dress ‘was rarely viewed as a direct challenge to hegemonic norms of gender in Victorian fashion culture’, but it was based on artistic conceptions of naturalness instead.[iii] Yet Aesthetic dress, too, appealed to New Women, in both fiction and fact.   [i] Madeleine C. Seys, ‘Rational Dress’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, ed. by Lesa Scholl and Emily Morris (Cham: Palgrave, 2022), pp. 1317-20 (p. 1318). [ii] Kimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2013), p. xi. [iii] Kimberly Wahl, ‘Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Boundaries of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture’, in Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend, ed. by Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry (Bristol: Intellect, 2020), pp. 22-34 (p. 22)