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Part I of this article was originally written as a Foreword to William B. Dillingham's edition of the children's fiction writer Juliana Horatia Ewing, Artistic Duplicity: The Fiction and Poetry of Juliana Horatia Ewing. (2020). Part II uses this occasion, the final volume of ELT , to reflect on the internal complexities of the Transition Period: humanitarianism and empire; Aesthetes, Naturalists, realists; micro and macro; Christian chivalry and race domination; moralism and immorality. [72 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A difficulty in approaching Wilde's theory of aesthetics is that it has sometimes been set aside as simply another example of his penchant for clever turns of phrase and paradox, critics thinking his criticism a form of public entertainment. Wilde is partially to blame for people overlooking the depth of his aesthetic theory, since he was sometimes guilty of saying something just because it was clever. Masked behind Wilde's façade of flippancy and wit, however, is an aesthetic theory steeped in philosophical tradition and hinting at the powerful problem of perception. Wilde's aesthetic theory and his views of perception evolved over time. He conceived of a wide-ranging, subversive aesthetic theory that reached not only across the arts but also across the entire social fabric of the nineteenth century and caused him to look at the world in a radically different way from most of his contemporaries. [146 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explains the founding of the ELT Period, also called the Transition Era, 1880-1920. The many "minor" authors discussed here, whom Samuel Butler referred to as the "hewers of wood and tillers of the soil," played an important role in preparing the ground for Yeats, Eliot, James Joyce and other moderns. The period from 1880 until about 1920 seems like Walter Pater's late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, "a brilliant but in part abortive effort" to revitalize Art and Life, a "little renaissance" but a renaissance nevertheless. The article directs its attention to the energy in quest for newness, a new life in the arts and a new artistic temperament in life, concentrating on two kinds of evidence: that which bears on the language and form of art; that which bears on the content of art. [137 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wilde and Chesterton may seem an unlikely pair. The overlap in critical diction between those who discuss modernist difficulty as playing tricks and those who discuss Chesterton's and Wilde's work as playing tricks is not coincidental. This article argues that the essay as practiced by both offers a new way to discern and articulate what it means for a text to be understood and to fashion itself as difficult. Both Chesterton and Wilde write form-visible, self-consciously stylized essays, provoking questions that parallel those surrounding modernist difficulty. Through their essays both coerce a critical posture of constant uncertainty as to whether what one is encountering is illusory, substantive, or somehow both. To differing degrees they leave readers with a sense of the substantive being made possible by the illusory. They caricature, magnify, and distend comprehensibility, making it if not less comprehensible less invisible. [142 words] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fin de siècle, the heyday of aestheticism, was a period of uncertainty and rapid change. It was also a period of clash of various ideological stances and world views, and this atmosphere of crisis gave emergence to various, usually conflicting literary and sociological developments. It should be noted, however, that while the distinctive mood of the fin de siècle was a feeling of failure and doom, this crisis was also capable of producing hope from within. Although the representative figures of aestheticism and the decadent movement laid no claim to any ideological stance, their works were subversive and utopian. This paper proposes to discuss the movements as expressions of this hope that provided an implicit commentary on that crisis, and it explores this utopian element focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as some of his well-known essays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]