Talk on Nineteenth Century Australian Gothic Fiction

If you're in Sydney on 27 July, feel free to come along to this talk at the Art Gallery of NSW:

Nineteenth Century Australian Gothic Horror
In association with the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition The Poetry of Drawing Dr James Doig, editor of anthologies of Australian Gothic fiction, delves into the characters and stories of nineteenth-century Australian Gothic horror. The Pre-Raphaelite art style encouraged a significant revival of medieval and gothic imagery in British culture.

Time: 6:30pm-7:00pm Jul 27 Cost: Free
Venue: Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain
Enquiries: Art Gallery of NSW artgallery.nsw.gov.au (02) 1800679278

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/calendar/poetry-drawing-celebrity-event/

Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Gary William Crawford, Brian J. Showers, and I submitted the full, final text for this compilation to Hippocampus Press last week and should have the book in print later this Summer or Fall. Jason Van Hollander will be doing the cover illustration. Contents are as follows:

Preface – W. J. Mc Cormack

Introduction – The Editors

Acknowledgements

I. SOME NOTES ON BIOGRAPHY

A Memoir of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Alfred Perceval Graves

Anecdotes from Seventy Years of Irish Life – W. R. Le Fanu

Extracts from Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others – S. M. Ellis

The Portraits of Le Fanu – Jim Rockhill, Brian J. Showers and Douglas A. Anderson

A Void Which Cannot Be Filled Up: The Obituaries of J. S. Le Fanu – Brian J. Showers

II. GENERAL STUDIES

M. R. James on J. S. Le Fanu – M. R. James

Forgotten Creator of Ghosts—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Possible Inspirer of the Brontës –Edna Kenton

Sheridan Le Fanu – E. F. Benson

From The Supernatural in Fiction – Peter Penzoldt

An Irish Ghost – V. S. Pritchett

“Prologue” and “Epilogue” to Madam Crowl’s Ghost – M. R. James

Doubles, Shadows, Sedan-Chairs, and the Past: “The Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu” – Patricia Coughlan

III. SOME SPECIAL TOPICS

Making Light in the Shadow Box: The Artistry of Le Fanu – Kel Roop

Le Fanu’s House by the Marketplace – Wayne Hall

Sheridan Le Fanu and the Spirit of 1798 – Albert Power

H. P. Lovecraft’s Response to the Work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu – Jim Rockhill

“A Regular Contributor”: Le Fanu’s Short Stories, All the Year Round, and the Influence of Dickens – Simon Cooke

A Shared Vision: Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr – Gary William Crawford

Dreyer, Vampyr and Sheridan Le Fanu – Mark Le Fanu

IV. CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS

Contemporary Reviews of the Publications of J. Sheridan Le Fanu – Compiled by the Editors

V. STUDIES OF INDIVIDUAL WORKS

“Green Tea”: The Archetypal Ghost Story – Jack Sullivan

“Introduction” to The House by the Churchyard – Elizabeth Bowen

Three Ghost Stories: “The Judge’s House”, “Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House on Aungier Street”, and “Mr. Justice Harbottle” – Carol A. Senf

“Introduction” to Uncle Silas – M. R. James

Conversations in a Shadowed Room: The Blank Spaces in “Green Tea” – John Langan

“Introduction” to Uncle Silas – Elizabeth Bowen

“Addicted to the Supernatural”: Spiritualism and Self-Satire in Le Fanu’s All in the Dark – Stephen Carver

In the Name of the Mother: Perverse Maternity in “Carmilla” – Jarlath Killeen

Crossing Boundaries, Mixing Genres in The Wyvern Mystery – Sally C. Harris

“I resolved to play the part of a good Samaritan”: Metafiction in “The Room in the Dragon Volant” – William Hughes

“The Child that Went with the Faeries”: The Folk Tale and the Ghost Story – Peter Bell

The Smashed Looking Glass: Fragmentation and Narrative Perversity in Willing to Die – Victor Sage

Bibliography

Sources

Biographical Notes

***

Extra kudos are due Brian - The Keeper of the Text - for bearing the brunt of the typing, keeping track of the word count, and channeling the various revisions for this endeavor.

Jim

A O Chater

A 1963 study, The Modern Novel, by Paul West covers all the authors you would expect, but is also surprisingly acute about those not then so well known – Ford Madox Ford; Henry Green; Denton Welch; Ronald Firbank; Malcolm Lowry. This is the mark of a critic not afraid to venture beyond the established canon. He also briefly mentions some of the more interesting books by newer authors he has seen recently. One of these was Julian Fairfield by A.O. Chater (1961).

It is, he says, a book “in which what is said melts into the reactions the words produce.” Further, “in some ways Chater’s novel reverses the method of Nathalie Sarraute, who combines pre-speech in all its inchoateness with uttered words”. “Naturally,” West continues, “such explorations lead to muddle, imprecision, lack of pointing…and turgidity.” “They also,” the critic concludes, “lead to concentration on episodes to the neglect of overall structure – an error into which Proust falls.”

This doesn’t look very likely to send the reader away to pursue Chater’s title. So it may be as well to quote from the dustwrapper’s valiant attempt to describe the book: “Twenty years old, this novel’s hero decides to free himself from domestic claustrophobia and launch himself into a new life…He boards a train to an unknown town in the north, assumes the name of “Julian Fairfield” and proceeds with innocence and confidence to deny his past and recreate a present.” The word ‘recreate’ here is a very sly and apposite one, for ‘recreate’ is exactly what Fairfield does: the new present he encounters in the town turns out to be an exact shadow of his former life, in a carefully crafted, subtle and ingenious series of moves by the author. The town itself is not in the least fantastical: it has a castle, cathedral, inn, factory, railway station, and yet the way that Fairfield encounters them, and how they mesh with his destiny, has an unreal dimension to it.

The rest of the dustwrapper’s narrative sticks cautiously to observable facts, until it ends by invoking the author’s intent: “It is A.O. Chater’s concern to probe his hero’s motives, and to question the understanding and the control that he has over these events. Julian Fairfield is an absorbing first novel by a young writer, an exciting and mature study of a soul in flight – a coward soul.” “Absorbing”, if not exactly distinctive, is a fair word to use about the book; “exciting” is a lunge too far. The literary allusion to a “coward soul” does not help very much either: the book’s “hero” is a young man of apprehension and delicacy, who often faces defeat, but “coward” is too bold and unkind an epithet to fling at him.

There are a few books whose “atmosphere”, to employ a vague and yet useful term, is like that of Julian Fairfield - Peter de Mendelssohn’s The Hours and the Centuries (1944); and David Wheldon’s The Viaduct (1983). They achieve the effect of making an apparently naturalistic narrative seem dreamlike and strange, rather like a plainer de la Mare. It is perfectly possible that some readers may not see anything in Chater’s book at all: at times, as I read it, I found myself baffled by its calm, careful, simple style and rather remorseless mapping out of a particularly predestined plot. Still, I persevered: and the book has persevered with me, quietly insinuating its images and qualities into my thoughts ever since. And so I still cannot quite be sure whether it is a masterpiece or an interesting failure.

A.O. Chater seems to have written a few short stories as well as his novel, before becoming a full time botanist, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and writing several titles in this field. In 1988 he was (as Arthur O. Chater) in the Department of Botany at the British Museum. It is recorded that he “embarked upon an investigation of the ants of Cardiganshire in 1986” and he also reported to a survey sightings of the pine marten. Whether his studies meant that he abandoned fiction, or whether there is somewhere a drawer-full of unpublished Julian Fairfields, I do not know. His single novel is a sort of English provincial Kafkaesque, deftly constructed so that it is a mirror image of itself, very plainly told (almost too plainly) and with an underlying tone of dejection and awkwardness: unusual, intelligent, possibly needing some greater strangeness to make it really work, and yet for all that a peculiar and memorable book.

Australian Hauntings: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Bibliography

The third and final volume of James Doig's excellent trilogy of historical Australian supernatural fiction has now come out from Equilibrium Books.  Following Australian Gothic (2007) and Australian Nightmares (2008), James put out a bargain-priced sampler collection with Wordsworth Editions, titled Australian Ghost Stories,  that would get more distribution in the US and the UK.  At last James has now finished the trilogy with Australian Hauntings: Colonial Supernatural Fiction.  What makes this volume more special is the long introduction (about 20 pages) about what makes colonial ghost stories, how they work as stories in relation to specific aspects of the Australian experience or environment. A fine capstone to James's trail-blazing explorations of a specific area of supernatural literature that had been too little mapped.

The three volumes from Equilibrium Books can be ordered via their web bookstore here. James has also just published an article on "Australian Ghost Stories" in the June 2011 issue of the quarterly magazine of the National Library of Australia, which you can see here, as well as download a pdf of the article (which has some very interesting illustrations).  

Another resource of interest is the post on "Australian Horror History" at the website of the Austrlian Horror Writers Association.  There you can find the contents listed from several anthologies published over the last thirty years which cover the field of the Australian supernatural story.  Especially worth noting is the list of "Recommended Australian Horror Stories to Circa 1950".

Robert W. Chambers's Artwork for The King in Yellow

I've long understood that some of the artwork that appears on various covers of editions (but not the first printing) of The King in Yellow (1895) by Robert W. Chambers, was believed to be based on artwork by Chambers himself.  At last the evidence has emerged!  It comes in the form of original artwork by Chambers for a publicity poster from 1895, from the estate of Forrest J. Ackerman.  A truly gorgeous poster!

A close-up shows the signature in the mountains to the right:

Here you can see a few of the modified versions that appear on books, including a later printing of the Neely edition and the Ace paperback from the 1960s:

For information about the restoration of the original artwork, there is an article here.

Chambers's own color-scheme is infinitely more seductive. I'd really like to see more of Chambers's own art.

Tolkien Studies 8, and a new Blog on Tolkien and Fantasy

Tolkien Studies volume 8 has gone to the printer.  The contents of the new issue can be viewed at my new blog Tolkien and Fantasy, which I've started in order to post news and musings about more modern and familiar writers. I will continue to contribute to Wormwoodiana as in the past, but I have also felt the need for a different forum for posts on more modern writers. Thus the new blog. 

Medusa Press

For some years now Medusa Press has been quietly producing occasional volumes of weird fiction, nicely designed and of high production values. I believe their first book was Frank Chigas's The Damp Chamber and Other Bad Places (2004), and since then they have published two further collections of his work, and also branched out into reprinting older materials.


I was delighted with Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon, which came out in 2006, collecting nineteen stories from three of Gordon's earlier collections, plus ten hitherto uncollected stories and one story newly written for this volume.

Last year Medusa Press released a new edition of a 1920s novel of legendary rarity, Oliver Sherry's Mandrake (Jarrolds, 1929), with a new introduction by Richard Dalby.  Dalby tells us that "Oliver Sherry" was the pseudonym of an Irishman, George Edmund Lobo (1894-1971), a minor figure remembered primarily for his poetry.  Though published last fall, I learned of this reissue only recently, and now having a copy I observe that Medusa Press has made an especially elegant reissue, with a distinctive dust-wrapper design as well as a really cool binding underneath.  Good work like this should be noticed, so I copy the wrapper and binding below.  Order via the publisher's website. 

new issue of Fastitocalon

I'm somewhat late on reporting this, but the second issue (concluding the"Immortals and the Undead" theme of volume one) of Fastitocalon appeared around the end of last year.  I'll copy the table of contents below.  I contributed a couple of "Notes on Neglected Fantasists", and an article on M.R. James and Dracula, which identifies for the first time in English the author of the pre-Dracula vampire story "The Mysterious Stranger", revived by Montague Summers in the 1930s from an old translation from the German, published without attribution.  The story is by the completely forgotten C. von Wachsmann (1787-1862); it appeared under the title "Der Fremde" in the 1844 volume of his Erzählungen und Novellen. 

Another article in the new issue of Fastitocalon worth noting here is Robert Eighteen-Bisang's "Arthur Conan Doyle's Dracula" which presents a fascinating thesis about Doyle's "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client". Order via the publisher's website, or for more information see the journal's website.

Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern [v 1 #2, 2010] (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, ISBN 978-86821-274-7 ISSN 1869-960X, Euros 15.00, tp) "Immortals and the Undead"
91 · Introduction · Fanfan Chen & Thomas Honegger · in
93 · Consuming Life: Narcissism, Liminality, and the Posthuman Condition in Bulwer-Lytton's "A Strange Story"· Bruce Wyse · ar 
113 · The Evolution of the Quest for Immortality in Science Fiction and the Fantastic: Spirituality, Corporeality, Virtuality · Roger Bozzetto and Fanfan Chen · ar
127 · Some Notes on the Depictions of Immortals in Medieval Oriental Manuscripts · Anna Caiozzo· ar
141 · The Making of a Hilarious Undead: Bisociation in teh Novels of Terry Pratchett · Thomas Scholz · ar  153 · Reporting the Stubborn Undead: Revenants and Vampires in Twelfth Century English Literature (II) · Eugenio M. Olivares Merino · ar
179 · Arthur Conan Doyle's "Dracula" · Robert Eighteen-Bisang · ar
189 · A Note on M.R. James and Dracula · Douglas A. Anderson · ar
195 · Notes on Neglected Fantasists · Douglas A. Anderson · ar; James Dickie (1934- ), C. Bryson Taylor (1880-?).
199 · About the Authors · [Misc.] · bg