Ernest Dowson

Das Interesse an der englischen Lyrik des sogenannten Fin-de-Siècle 1 hat sich in Deutschland immerhin in einigen jüngeren Übersetzungen niederge-schlagen. So hat Frank Stückemann Ernest Dowson und Lionel Johnson 2 übersetzt und Hans Wipperfürth A. E. Housman. Und nun legt der renom-mierte Berliner Anglist Manfred Pfister, Spezialist u.a. für Oscar Wilde und das Fin-de-Siècle, 3 eine neue Übersetzung im Rahmen einer zweisprachi-1 Siehe allgemein Handbuch Fin de Siècle / hrsg. von Sabine Haupt und Stefan Bodo Würffel.-Stuttgart : Kröner, 2008.-XXII, 950 S. : Ill. ; 22 cm.-ISBN 978-3-520-83301-3 : EUR 49.00 [9888].-Rez.: IFB 08-1/2-300 http://swbplus.bsz-bw.de/bsz285758837rez.htm-Ferner: Fin de siècle / Monika Fludernik .

This volume, edited by Alice Condé and Jessica
Gossling, originated in a symposium at Goldsmiths in April 2016, constitutes the first full-length critical study of Dowson’s works published in English. The collection
is divided into two sections: ‘Texts’ (close readings of
Dowson’s poetry and prose) and ‘Contexts’
(Dowson’s interactions with contemporaries, and
reassessments of his influence on twentieth-century
literature and music).

Explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson

This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as it is advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde’s early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters.

This short essay on Symons' poem was published in a volume of papers editied by Agostino Lombardo, "Gioco di Specchi, Saggi sull'oso letterario dell'immagine dello specchio", Rome (1999).
It discusses the importance of the dance theme in later 19th century poetry and in particular how Symons uses it and the image of the dancer in the mirror to create an art lyric in which the moment of tension between what is real and what is only perceived is heightened by the ephemeral nature of the spectacle.

For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development, and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar faces such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson, to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel. New research illuminates the relationship between the Decadents and such popular writers as George Moore, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Marie Corelli, and Sarah Grand. This research also challenges myths about the Decadents. It describes how this so-called 'tragic generation' pursued their artistic aspirations in the literary marketplace, created an art form that was more popular than avant-garde, sought both literary and commercial success, and negotiated the transition from the Victorian triple-decker to experimental Modernist fiction. MacLeod fills a large gap in our knowledge of a pivotal but misunderstood literary and cultural movement.