This chapter considers The Picture of Dorian Gray in the context of the history of emotions, seeing Wilde’s novel as revolving around a conflictive dialogue between a decadent and a melodramatic way of structuring emotion. There is a knotty conversation about these issues within Wilde’s novel that gradually turns into an exploration of the changing relationship between emotions, ethics, and aesthetics at the Victorian fin de siècle. The Picture of Dorian Gray emerges as a work that ultimately mediates between Victorian and modernist approaches to the role of feeling, and in particular, feeling with. The subject of melodrama is usually left out of critical discussions of Dorian Gray but this chapter explores that supposedly degraded, limited form as it relates melodramatic form to aesthetics, ethics, and the emotions.

This article reads the contemporary monument conflicts connected to the Black Lives Matter movement in France alongside the erection and destruction of fictional monuments in a bestselling utopian novel from three centuries ago: Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An deux mille quatre cent quarante: Rêve s’il en fût jamais (1771). The article throws light on how contemporary BLM interventions in the cityscape respond to still unresolved issues regarding the meaning of liberté, egalité, and fraternité in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and race; examines the discursive mechanisms behind the history of slavery becoming notoriously unremembered in France; and, in conclusion, considers the unrealized utopian potentiality of Mercier’s novel in relation to the most recent projects to memorialize slavery in Paris. 

“Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribalmemory?”(Walcott 1979: 25). In his poem “The Sea is History”(1979), Derek Walcott makes reference to the colonialist perception of the Caribbean as a historically empty area. On these so-called sugar islands, as the area has often been reductively referred to, nothing had happened before the European land-fall, and precious little after that, except the production of tropical consumer goods which brought wealth to the metropoles but left no cultural or material traces of any consequence on the islands themselves. As Frantz Fanon describes this colonialist mindset in Les damnés de la terre(1961): “The settler makes his-tory; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey. He is the absolute beginning: ‘This landwas created by us’; he is its unceasing cause”(Fanon 2001: 39–40). Hand in hand with this belief is the conviction that the land would decay and revert toits previous immobility if colonialism would come to an end:“‘If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages’”(Fanon 2001: 40). In astriking image, Fanon describes this simultaneous erasure of the settled land’s own history and inscription of that of the imperialists as crystallized in the symbolic oppression of monuments. The“colonial world” is “a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with itsstones the backs flayed by whips.”

V. S. Naipaul's novel The Enigma of Arrival revolves around peripatetic explorations of an England in decay. Saturated in pensive sadness, the novel has been read often as nostalgic for the time of empire. Against such views, this article reconsiders Enigma's affective strategies by illuminating how it appropriates a romantic imaginary of walking among ruins and re-posits it in postcolonial context. The article demonstrates how Enigma's romanticist sadness and embodied engagement with place perform a critical revision of idealized fantasies of England and its imperial history.