The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850–1930

247 Pages·2009·3.261 MB·English

by  Yvonne Ivory (auth.)

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
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Titles include:
Eitan Bar-Yosef and Nadia Valman (editors)
‘THE JEW’ IN LATE-VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CULTURE
Between the East End and East Africa
Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors)
ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS
Editors, Authors, Readers
Colette Colligan
THE TRAFFIC IN OBSCENITY FROM BYRON TO BEARDSLEY
Sexuality and Exoticism in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
Dennis Denisoff
SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950
Laura E. Franey
VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE
Lawrence Frank
VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE
The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
Yvonne Ivory
THE HOMOSEXUAL REVIVAL OF RENAISSANCE STYLE, 1850–1930
Jarlath Killeen
THE FAITHS OF OSCAR WILDE
Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland
Stephanie Kuduk Weiner
REPUBLICAN POLITICS AND ENGLISH POETRY, 1789–1874
Kirsten MacLeod
FICTIONS OF BRITISH DECADENCE
High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle
Diana Maltz
BRITISH AESTHETICISM AND THE URBAN WORKING CLASSES, 1870–1900
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VERNON LEE
Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics
Muireann O’Cinneide
ARISTOCRATIC WOMEN AND THE LITERARY NATION, 1832–1867
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Julia Reid
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, SCIENCE, AND THE FIN DE SIÈCLE
Anne Stiles (editor)
NEUROLOGY AND LITERATURE, 1860–1920
Caroline Sumpter
THE VICTORIAN PRESS AND THE FAIRY TALE
Ana Parejo Vadillo
WOMEN POETS AND URBAN AESTHETICISM
Passengers of Modernity
Phyllis Weliver
THE MUSICAL CROWD IN ENGLISH FICTION, 1840–1910
Class, Culture and Nation
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The Homosexual Revival
of Renaissance Style,
1850–1930
Yvonne Ivory
© Yvonne Ivory 2009
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-21997-4
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
To my parents, brothers, and sister
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
Part I Reviving Renaissance Individualism
1 C onsummate Criminals: Nineteenth-Century Renaissance
Historiography and the Homosexual 13
2 I ndividualist Inverts: Self-Realization as a Liberatory Sexual
Discourse at the Turn of the Century 49
Part II Styling Queer Personalities
3 P oison, Passion, and Personality: Oscar Wilde’s Renaissance
Self-Fashioning 83
4 T he Erotics of Fame; or, How Thomas Mann Conquered
the Renaissance 109
5 O rlando Emergent: Vita Sackville-West’s Renaissance
Personae 137
Conclusion 153
Notes 157
Bibliography 213
Index 229
vii
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the support of
numerous individuals and organizations. Generous research and travel
grants from UCLA, Duke University, and the University of South Carolina
have enabled me to access crucial documents in far-flung l ocations and
spend time writing up my findings. A short-term research grant from
the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) allowed me to work on
materials at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich’s Stadtarchiv, and
the Monacensia Literaturarchiv. To the latter institution I am particularly
indebted for allowing me to work on the original manuscript of Thomas
Mann’s play Fiorenza. My thanks are due, too, to the British Library
and to Oxford University’s Bodleian Library for access to unpublished
materials by Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper (Michael
Field). The Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, Bloomington,
holds many of Vita Sackville-West’s letters and diaries, and was most
helpful in letting me examine these materials. Similarly, librarians in
Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library
cheerfully facilitated my work on manuscripts by Oscar Wilde in the
Robert H. Taylor Collection. I am grateful to Joseph Donohue and the
late Nigel Nicolson for helping me locate obscure manuscripts that
proved very important to my research. But I am perhaps most deeply
indebted to the archivists and librarians at the William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library at UCLA for the use of materials in their unrivalled
‘Oscar Wilde and the 1890s’ collection. The knowledge, enthusiasm,
and generosity of the Clark team makes working on Wilde a real joy.
A shortened version of Chapter 2 appeared as ‘The Urning and His
Own: Individualism and the Fin-de-Siècle Invert’, German Studies Review
26:2 (2003): 333–52. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the
German Studies Association. Chapter 3 was published in an earlier,
shorter form as ‘Wilde’s Renaissance: Poison, Passion, and Personality’,
Victorian Literature and Culture 35:2 (2007), 517–36, and is reprinted with
the kind permission of Cambridge University Press. Hans Thoma’s
‘Wandfries aus dem Musiksaal des Hauses Pringsheim’ is reproduced
courtesy of the Stuttgarter Staatsgalerie.
Without the extraordinary patience and intellectual rigor of Joseph
Bristow and James A. Schultz this book would not have been written.
I am deeply indebted to both of them. My thanks are due, too, to the
viii
Acknowledgements ix
many friends, colleagues, and scholars who shared ideas, feedback, and
encouragement with me over the years, including Ehrhard Bahr, Eva
Geulen, Andrew Hewitt, Anna Kuhn, Alice Kuzniar, Helmut Puff, Elise
Mueller, Eva-Maria Russo, Julia Offen, James Rolleston, Ann Marie
Rasmussen, Barbara Mennel, Hugh M. Ridley, Inge Walther, and espe-
cially Peter McIsaac and Lisa Parkes. Feedback from the reviewers and
editors at German Studies Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and
Palgrave Macmillan has proved invaluable. Prisca Augustyn, Elisa
Hermann, and Sean Ketchem provided help with Italian and Latin trans-
lations. My colleagues in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures at the University of South Carolina have been very generous in
providing the professional and personal support that allowed me to
finish this book: my thanks to them.
Finally, without my family I would not even have started on this
project. Jennifer Pournelle’s support has never flagged, and pushed
me past the most difficult phases of writing (and sometimes precisely
not writing). But were it not for the book-rich, loving, supportive
environment with which my parents and siblings surrounded me
while growing up, the very idea of embarking on such a project might
never have even occurred to me. It is to them, in thanks, that I dedicate
this book.