| 1. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Adam Lee, The Platonism of Walter Pater: Embodied Equity
- 2021
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In: Victoriographies. - : Edinburgh University Press. - 2044-2416 .- 2044-2424. ; 11:3, s. 341-344
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Review (other academic/artistic)abstract
- According to Edmund Gosse, Walter Pater protested misrepresentations of Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), commenting: ‘I wish they wouldn’t call me “a hedonist”; it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek.’1 This focus on the classical heritage was characteristic: remembered today for his leading role in the aestheticism movement and as a novelist and art critic, Pater was, by profession, fellow of Brasenose, lecturing throughout his career on classical philosophy, literature, and art. Whereas earlier critics such as Richard Jenkyns dismissed Pater’s quality as a classical scholar, the topic has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, most notably with Charles Martindale, Stefano Evangelista, and Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Pater the Classicist (2017). Adam Lee’s monograph sides with these recent reassessments, making the case that Plato’s philosophy was central to everything that Pater wrote and thought.
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| 2. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Aestheticism and Decadence in Britain and France
- 2021
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In: The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030408664 ; , s. 771-790
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter surveys the Gothic writers associated with the aestheticism and decadence movement in Britain and France. Contextualising the movement’s roots in the Romantic tradition, the chapter focuses on the work of Charles Baudelaire, Charles Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen. It shows the ways in which these authors gained mutual inspiration from one another, using the Gothic to shed light on both the modernity of the nineteenth century and to problematise its pretentions towards having all the answers. In the course of the chapter, we meet aesthetic and decadent fauns, lamia, werewolves and vampires, consider the ways in which the tradition treats sexual desire and violence, and its interest in a world ‘beyond’, both in its discussions of witchcraft, the occult and Satanism, and in its use of the trope of the ‘gods in exile’. The chapter concludes by arguing for the significance of the aesthetic and decadent tradition on the development of twentieth-century Gothic.
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| 3. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Huysmans and Fin de Siècle Paris
- 2021
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In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783319625928
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Huysmans was a Parisian author closely associated with the decadent movement. His importance to urban literary studies lies in his transitional role, depicting a Paris poised between that of the naturalists and the modernists. While his early novels were written under the spell of Émile Zola, he broke definitively with naturalism in À rebours [Against Nature] (1884) and was a champion of impressionism in journalism collected in L’art moderne (1883). Following the publication of À rebours, Huysmans became a leading international figure in the decadent movement, and it was during this period that he wrote Là-Bas [The Damned] (1891), a novel set in the world of fin de siècle Parisian Satanism. In the later 1890s, however, he found religion and, in his final decade of his life, spent time away from Paris on spiritual retreats, experiences he dramatized in the trilogy of novels En Route (1895), La Cathédrale (1898), an encomium to Notre-Dame de Chartres, and L’Oblat (1903).
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| 4. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism
- 2021
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In: The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030408664 ; , s. 595-611
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter focuses on J.-K. Huysmans’ contributions to nineteenth-century gothic literature. Contextualising his work as a response to naturalism and its ‘materialism’, the chapter reads in detail the gothic of Huysmans’ decadent period. À rebours [Against Nature] examines the ennui of living at the end of the nineteenth century, and in its arresting dream sequences, allegorises the condition of modernity as a degeneration of the species. In asking whether Christianity can satisfy the subject’s spiritual demands at the fin de siècle, À rebours compares to Là-Bas [The Damned], set in the world of contemporary Satanism. The chapter focuses on Huysmans’ links to the world of the Parisian occult, before concluding with a brief discussion of La Cathédrale, a novel written after Huysmans’ conversion to Catholicism. This interest in a world ‘beyond’ links Huysmans’ novels of decadent gothic to those chronicling his spiritual conversion.
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| 5. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Lewis Carroll and ‘Dinah’ : An Unnoted Joke in the Oxford Pamphlets
- 2021
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In: Notes and Queries. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0029-3970 .- 1471-6941. ; 68:3, s. 321-324
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Early in Charles Dodgson’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), the protagonist finds herself falling down a rabbit hole. In the impossibly extended period of this fall, she entertains herself by musing about the fate of ‘Dinah’, her cat, before engaging in a little wordplay over whether or not cats eat bats. As is well known, Dodgson had first narrated the story to the daughters of his friend and colleague, Henry Liddell (1811–1898), including Alice (1852–1934), one of the inspirations for the titular character, during a boat trip from Oxford to Godstow, taken 4 July 1862. In a footnote to the Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner notes that the name Dinah derives from that of one of two cats, Dinah and Villikins, that the Liddell children had themselves ‘named after a popular song, “Villikins and His Dinah”’. It is in this context that we may unpack joke alluding to ‘Dinah’ in a different work published by Dodgson during the same period, The Dynamics of a Parti-cle (1865), one that has been hitherto passed over by the critical heritage.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray
- 2021
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In: The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. - Cham : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030408664 ; , s. 791-805
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This chapter focuses on Oscar Wilde’s contributions to nineteenth-century gothic literature. It reads his work historically as an engagement with the modernity of late Victorian life, and contextualizes themes that Wilde investigates alongside contemporary interest in ideas such as chiromancy, mesmerism and spiritualism, as well as phrenology and sexology. The chapter begins by examining Wilde’s humorous gothic short stories, ‘The Canterville Ghost’ and ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, before reading in detail his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as a work of decadent Gothic. The chapter concludes by briefly considering some of Wilde’s later gothic pieces, such as the play Salomé.
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| 8. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Pater and Schelling
- 2021
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In: Studies in Walter Pater and aestheticism. - 2445-5962. ; :6
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)
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| 9. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Peter Collister (ed.), The American Scene by Henry James
- 2021
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In: Notes and Queries. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 0029-3970 .- 1471-6941. ; 68:1, s. 147-148
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Review (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Considering what he calls ‘The Scale of the Infusion’, one of the running-heads to the British edition of The American Scene (1907), Henry James professes himself at something of a loss. Faced by the overwhelming ‘impression’ of New York, James finds the spectacle resistant to attempts to make it ‘legible’, to find meaning from the vision of excess which lay profligate all around him. The travelogue recalls James’ journey to America in 1904–05, his first trip back to his homeland in over twenty years. Having made his name and career in Europe, James was fresh from the recent completion of the novels of his so-called ‘major phase’, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904). But if the trip was a return of the native (James was disappointed that Thomas Hardy had already taken this title (3 n.2)), the person who returned was not the one who had left to seek his literary fortune. As such, The American Scene is a document of James’ sense of ‘dispossession’ (100), of a subject unable to fix his sense of the past or comprehend the new America he encountered.
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| 10. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(author)
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Romantic Irony : Problems of Interpretation in Schlegel and Carlyle
- 2021
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In: The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. - Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan. - 9783030566456 ; , s. 341-360
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Book chapter (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Thomas Carlyle’s novel, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), has puzzled audiences since its first publication. Constituting one of the most ambitious attempts to put into practice Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of romantic irony in the Anglophone tradition, the novel is curiously resistant to interpretation. This chapter begins by considering how irony in general may be read through humour theory, before addressing the problem of understanding romantic irony in particular. It considers the critical heritage on romantic irony, in particular as represented by the interventions of G.W.F. Hegel and Paul de Man, which has traditionally marginalised the humour in Schlegel’s theory and in romantic irony in general, instead prioritising its ‘serious’ and philosophical qualities. Against this received view, the chapter suggests ways in which Schlegel’s ‘transcendental buffoonery’ is instead conceived of as a humorous experience in which the irony calls the romantic subject into question. The chapter then reads Sartor Resartus as a case study of romantic irony, contextualising the problems inherent in ‘getting’ this kind of humour, both for the Victorian audience who first read the novel and for the modern ones who seek to unpack it.
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