Review by Choice Review
From her brilliant insight that Decadence developed partly as a response to the recurring ``spectre of autonomous language,'' Dowling counterpoints a succinct history of linguistic theory from Locke (1690) through the Neogrammarians (fl.1870) against English literature from Wordsworth through Yeats. Linguistic theory, by her encapsulation, alternated between a relativism originating from the people (Volk) and hence speech-oriented and a genius-based authoritarianism deriving from major writers and hence literature-oriented. Accordingly, she presents English Decadence as a rescue operation dedicated both to keeping written English from becoming a dead language and to wresting its dynamic from the common people. Her ``fatal book'' is Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885), and her tragic hero trying to keep language at once sacred, autonomous, and genuinely descriptive (rather than arbitrary) is Max M;uller (18231900), Wilde's tutor at Oxford and a member of Swinburne's examination committee. Dowling thus follows current Decadent scholarship in examining texts rather than life-styles and shows more systematically than any scholar to date how Decadence emerged within a widespread elitist conviction of a crisis in language. She interpolates smoothly the past quarter century of Decadence scholarship and gives the most sympathetic treatment yet of the Rhymers (Johnson, Dowson, Symons, Davidson et al.) before showing how Yeats transcended Aestheticism and brought the ``spectre'' under his control. For graduate libraries.-M.G. Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Dowling contends that late 19th-century literary Decadence ``emerged from a . . . crisis in Victorian attitudes towards language brought about by the new comparative philology earlier imported from the Continent.'' ``The literary tongue of the great English writers'' having become ``simply another dead language,'' writers like Pater, Swinburne, Wilde, and the young Yeats were left shoring the fragments of language against their ruins. This work is sophisticated and carefully argued, even if it finally seems to claim too much for the history of philology. It helps that Dowling offers illuminating interpretations of various literary Decadents, without overrating them. An original, thought-provoking work of cultural and literary criticism. Keith Cushman, English Dept., Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Library Journal Review