The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1975)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the English X Group of the Modern Language Association by New York University and Queens College, City University of New York.The Forms of Victorian Fiction / James R. Kincaid -- Method and Moral in George Eliot's Narrative / Elizabeth Ermarth -- Vision and Form: The English Novel and the Emergence of the Short Story / Wendell V. Harris -- Progressive Dubiety: The Discontinuity of Disraeli's Political Trilogy / Daniel R. Schwarz -- Pater's Conception of the Renaissance: From Sources to Personal Ideal / Billie Andrew Inman -- Critical Forum / G. B. Tennyson, Robert O. Preyer, James G. Nelson, and Phyllis Grosskurth -- Recent Publications: A Selected List / Arthur F. Minerof -- English X New

Late style and speaking out: J A Symonds's In the Key of Blue

This article examines In the Key of Blue (1893)—an essay collection by John Addington Symonds—as a case study in queer public utterance during the early 1890s. Viewed through the critical lens of late style, as theorised by Edward Said, the evolution of this project, from compilation through to reader reception, reveals Symonds's determination to “speak out” on the subject of homosexuality. Paradoxically, In the Key of Blue was thus a timely and untimely work: it belonged to a brief period of increased visibility and expressiveness when dealing with male same-sex desire, spearheaded by a younger generation of Decadent writers, but it also cut against the grain of nineteenth-century social taboo and legal repression. Symonds's essay collection brought together new and previously unpublished work with examples of his writing for the periodical press. These new combinations, appearing together for the first time, served to facilitate new readings and new inferences, bringing homosexual themes to the fore. This article traces the dialogic structure of In the Key of Blue , its strategies for articulating homosexual desire, and examines the response of reviewers, from the hostile to celebratory

Leslie Stephen

36 p.; 21 cm

’We Cannot Be Greek Now’: Age Difference, Corruption and the Making of Sexual Inversion.

types: Articlepublication status: Published© 2013 by Taylor & FrancisA Problem in Greek Ethics, A Problem in Modern Ethics and “Soldier Love” indicate that John Addington Symonds responded carefully to social anxieties regarding the influence and corruption of youth and placed increasing emphasis on presenting male same-sex desire as consensual and age-consistent. Situating Symonds’s work in the social and political context of the 1880s and 1890s, the article opens up a more complex understanding of Symonds’s reception of Greece. It also offers a new reading of his collaboration with Havelock Ellis by arguing that Symonds’s insistence on age-equal and reciprocal relationships between men strongly shaped Sexual Inversion. This shows that concerns about age difference and ideals of equality and reciprocity began to impact debates about male same-sex desire in the late nineteenth century – earlier than is generally assumed.The Wellcome Trus