Opening confession

Like many people, my intellectual faculties have felt dulled by lockdown and the restricted conditions under which we've all been living during the present coronavirus pandemic.* This blog represents an attempt to jumpstart work on a particular project which has suffered as a consequence. 

In 2017, I was commissioned by the Jewelled Tortoise imprint of the MHRA to produce a critical edition of George Moore's novel Confessions of a Young Man. If you do not already know this series, it is dedicated to important works from the late nineteenth century associated with Decadence and Aestheticism. There are already wonderful scholarly editions of the poetry of Arthur Symons, the short stories of Walter Pater and the weird fiction of Arthur Machen and other fantastic volumes are planned or in print.
  
I completed the basic work of assembling and annotating the novel's text by the start of 2020, but the pandemic hit just as I started work on the volume's introduction. This was planned as a major critical part of the project, where I would set out the history of the text and outline some of the key topics and issues raised by Moore in his novel. But my work for the introduction has remained as notes, fragments of ideas and quotations ever since.**



So, I'm hoping to use this blog to unpack and unravel some of those ideas and explore some of the general ideas about Moore and his writings that have arisen from the work I've done on this edition. Eventually, I'll gather this material up and revise it into the introduction. But in the meantime, I'm also hopeful that this blog might serve as a useful introduction to Moore and especially to Confessions of a Young Man, if anyone's interested.

I'm hoping that I will be able to produce blog entries on a weekly basis: I have a list of topics that should keep this going for around eight or nine weeks. My plan is to write short and focussed entries, although inevitably some of them may end up longer. As I get interested or excited by a critical project, I tend to get carried away. But that's the point of this exercise!

I'm going to turn off comments on individual posts. If you want to reach me to comment or provide feedback, you can find me on Twitter as @keatsandchapman.


* This is not said in protest. I recognise how lucky I am to have remained healthy and not to have lost family members. I am also deeply, deeply grateful to the staff of the NHS. Please show your own support by wearing a mask, getting the vaccine if you can and being cautious. The end is in sight, but this isn't over - yet.

** I mean this quite literally - I found an index card yesterday on which I had scrawled something that is now incomprehensible to me. 'Naturist concept of self because Unconscious drives'?

Comments

New comments are not allowed.

Popular posts from this blog

More Impressions of Zola

Image
This post is going to be a bit shorter and more patchy.* More precisely, it's about a current gap in my research. My previous post provided a bit of general information about Émile Zola and how important he was to George Moore. I suggested that Moore set himself up as an authority on Zola in London in the early 1880s, by writing critical articles about him, translating Zola's work and writing about him in Confessions of a Young Man . As an earlier post pointed out, however, Moore's attitude and disposition towards Zola changed considerably - where his early articles express sympathy and enthusiasm for the French writer, his later was response was more qualified even critical. I'm hoping to capture some of this in the appendices to the critical edition of Confessions that I'm working on, by reproducing some excerpts from Moore's journalism. But this is where I have run into problems, exacerbated by the COVID19 pandemic and crisis. Moore wrote an article for Eng
Read more

Waxing lyrical: Moore and Schopenhauer

Image
Caricature of Huysmans In my previous post on Moore and Huysmans I suggested that A rebours (1884)   and Confessions of a Young Man (1887) share a sense of equivocation or ambivalence that might be, in some respects, more truly Decadent than any reference to vice or excess. Another shared connection here is their relation to autobiography. Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes was frequently taken to be modelled upon himself by critics. And  Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as an autobiography - from the second English edition of 1889, the narrator even shared the same name as the author. In both cases, however, autobiographical identifications are important, but complex and hard to sustain at certain points.*  So, in this post and the next, I'll explore some points around Confessions and its vexed and complex status as autobiography. My starting point is passage from early in chapter 1: I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no
Read more

The Académie Julian

Image
Rudolph Julian I mentioned in my previous post that the narrator of Confessions of a Young Man moves from studying at the École des Beaux Arts to working in a smaller school based in the passage des Panoramas off the Boulevard Montmartre in the 2e arrondissement of Paris. The Académie Julian was founded in 1868 by Pierre Louis Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907), who had moved to Paris from the South of France. Moore was fascinated by Julian* and also wrote about him in an article entitled 'Meissonier and the Salon' for the Fortnightly Review in July 1890: M. Julian was once a shepherd in the south of France. In his native village he established a reputation for extraordinary strength and artistic capacity. He had thrown every young man within twenty miles in the wrestling contests, and he had astonished every one by the skill he showed in drawing. For a time his fate hung in the balance. A great wrestler or a great painter, which was he to be? Moore seems to have been greatly impres
Read more