55 research outputs found
āA Girl's Loveā: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women: a Cultural Review on 15/09/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.585045.This article explores the relationship between the poet Olive Custance and her husband Lord Alfred Douglas, arguing that Custance constructed Douglas as a male muse figure in her poetry, particularly the sequence āSongs of a Fairy Princessā (Rainbows 1902). The introduction sets out Custance's problematic historical positioning as a ādecadentā poet who published nothing following the Great War, but whose work came too late to fit into strictly āfin de siĆØcleā categories. I suggest, however, that Custance's oscillating constructions of gender and sexuality make her more relevant to the concerns of modernity than has previously been acknowledged and her work anticipates what is now termed āqueerā. The first main section of the article traces the cultural background of the fin de siĆØcle male muse, arguing that Custance's key influencesāmale homoerotic writers such as Wilde and Paterāmeant it was logical that she should imagine the muse as male, despite the problems associated with gender-reversals of the muse-poet relationship which have been identified by several feminist critics. I then move on to focus specifically on how Shakespearean discourses of gender performance and cross-dressing played a key role in Custance and Douglas's courtship, as they exchanged the fluid roles of āPrinceā, āPrincessā and āPageā. The penultimate section of the article focuses on discourses of fairy tale and fantasia in Custance's āSongs of a Fairy Princessā sequence, in which these fantasy roles contribute to a construction of Douglas as a feminised object, and the relationship between the āPrinceā and āPrincessā is described in terms of narcissistic sameness. My paper concludes by tracing the demise of Custance and Douglas's relationship; as Douglas attempted to be more āmanlyā, he sought to escape the role of object, resulting in Custance losing her male muse. But her sexually-dissident constructions of the male muse remain important experiments worthy of critical attention
Poems and Ballads
"Savill and Edwards, Printers."--t.p. verso.Opinions of the press on Atalanta and Chastelard, [1]-8 p. bound in before FFEP. $5 KU-SSecond edition. cf. T.J. Wise, A Swinburne library, p. 26-28.Mode of access: Internet
Untitled (Wishing you a Merry Christmas.)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1183/thumbnail.jp
Laus Veneris and other poems and ballads
VII, 328 p
Untitled (All Christmas Joys be Thine) (verso)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1182/thumbnail.jp
Untitled (New Years Greeting)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1179/thumbnail.jp
Untitled (Wishing you a Merry Christmas.) (verso)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1184/thumbnail.jp
Untitled (All Christmas Joys be Thine) (verso)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1182/thumbnail.jp
Untitled (New Years Greeting) (verso)
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/picturecollection_victorianholidaycards/1180/thumbnail.jp
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