This essay begins by discussing Victorian responses to euphuism, the ‘affected’ style of writing associated with the early modern author John Lyly. Focusing on Walter Pater’s association of euphuism with ‘decadent’ style at the fin de siècle, the essay analyses how euphuism was discussed, theorised, and characterised during the early modern period, noting the ways in which later critics might have considered this euphuistic style as ‘decadent.’ More specifically, comparison shows that both early modern euphuism and Pater’s ‘decadent’ style sought to figure themselves as a mode of ‘New English’ which embraced a certain sense of literary and linguistic ‘cosmopolitanism.’

Oxford University Press began publishing The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde under the editorial direction of Ian Small about two decades ago. The eleven volumes released so far have revolutionised many aspects of our understanding of Wilde’s writing practice and his careful navigation of the conditions of the late-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Appearing as volume 11 of The Complete Works, Josephine M. Guy’s Plays 4 collects Wilde’s first play, the tragedy Vera; or The Nihilist, and his first society comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first West End success. It follows three previous volumes devoted to Wilde’s drama – Joseph Donohue’s editions of Plays 1: The Duchess of Padua, Salomé: Drame en un Acte, Salome: Tragedy in One Act; Plays 2: Lady Lancing; and Plays 3: The Importance of Being Earnest. As with those previous editions, Guy has drawn on a vast number of surviving textual witnesses, including drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, and printed editions. These include evidence of Wilde’s emendations during rehearsals and illuminate his extensive revision process. Guy presents two versions of each play: a transcription of the heavily edited and revised manuscript of Vera and the 1893 Bodley Head printed version of Lady Windermere’s Fan, as well as reconstructed performance texts for each play. While Guy notes that the latter make ‘no claim to be “the” text as performed’ on the respective opening nights, the performance texts give invaluable insights into how differently the plays might have looked on stage compared to those versions generally collected, which have tended to rely on printed versions (100).

This is the second volume in a three-volume collection of primary sources which examines philosophy and literature in nineteenth-century Britain. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of British Literature and Philosophy. 

Walter Pater is a notoriously difficult writer to place. A classical scholar and don, Pater came to prominence with his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) as an impressionistic art critic, aesthete, and proponent of supposed decadent hedonism. Distinguishing himself as a writer of fiction in the 1880s, Pater also published authoritatively on an array of subjects in classical studies, literary studies, philosophy, and architecture. The compass of Pater's insight is daunting, especially given the modern tendency toward increased specialization: today's students and academics often pay lip service before the altar of interdisciplinarity but are rarely equipped for true service. Pater's example shows how far we fall short. He resists definition, as though by design, as when he quotes without attribution, alludes anachronistically, or translates without acknowledgment. Pater works seamlessly across languages, disciplines, and historical time, so one is never really certain that one can definitively place him at any given moment. Locating Pater becomes impossible, precisely since Pater disputes the very notion of disciplinary place, and because any act of placing him also involves displacing him from the various other places, spaces, and times which make up the text's context.