Goldsmiths, University of London
21 February 2025, RHB 137
Organised by the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths
The Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, is delighted to announce the second symposium on the fin-de-siècle writer Ernest Dowson - Ernest Dowson: Revived.
In what will be 125 years since he died of tuberculosis in a friend’s house in Catford, owning nothing but his tattered poetry notebook, Dowson has becoming something of a decadent legend. Bohemian, itinerant, and plagued by longing and loss (not least of his own teeth), he had an affinity with the capital city’s impoverished and intellectual spaces, as well as international literary and artistic circles. His exquisite, refined verses and prose are among some of the most technically adept and captivating works in the decadent canon.
The symposium will end with a celebration of the revised edition of Jad Adams’s biography of Dowson. Madder Music, Stronger Wine, which is being republished to mark the 125th anniversary of Dowson’s death.
Schedule
11.00 Dowson Graveside Vigil (Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries)
Please meet us by the Ladywell entrance at 11.00.
12.00 Lunch break (and make our way to Goldsmiths)
14.00 Symposium - RHB 137, Goldsmiths
14.15 Panel 1: Critical Responses
Michele Brugnetti (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘A portrait of the ‘decadent’ as a young novelist: the case of Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore’s Adrian Rome’
Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne), ‘Dowson in France: The Statute of Limitations in Poetic Translation’
Simon Wilson (Independent Scholar), ‘Viewing Verses: Dowson and the Decadent Decorated Book’
Robert Stilling (Florida State University), ‘The End of Every Song: Ernest Dowson, Apocalypticism, and The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World’ (via zoom)
15.15 Break
15.30 Panel 2: Creative Responses - A selection of poetic responses to Dowson’s work
Margaret Stetz, Eytan Kerbel, Leo Wynne-Williams, Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling
16.00 Round Table Discussion - ‘Madame de Viole: Dowson’s unpublished manuscript sees the light of day’
17.00 Book (Re)Launch - Jad Adams’s Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent
Abstracts and Bios
Michele Brugnetti (Sapienza University of Rome), ‘A portrait of the ‘decadent’ as a young novelist: the case of Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore’s Adrian Rome’
This contribution aims to shed a light on Adrian Rome by Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore. Meant to be ‘vindictive, savage, spleenful[,] libellous almost, to the last degree’ (quot. Stark, 2023: 23), the novel appears to pillory ‘the Decadent mania to aestheticize life at all costs’ (Stark, 2023: 13). Drawing from Matthew Potolsky’s analysis in ‘Decadence and Realism’ (2021), I interpret the novel as a tragicomic treatment of the anti-modern decadent novelist, and argue that the protagonist’s undoing is meant to signify the ‘rejection of the counterfeit health of the Victorian novel’ (Kristin Mahoney 2021). Within this framework, I contend that the novel transcends mere parody of the writer-aesthete, but that rather it reveals a deep mistrust in the myth of progress and in the possibility of harmonious reconciliation; as a consequence, the ‘decadent’ novelist emerges as a figure in painful and acute opposition to their historical times.
Biography
Michele Brugnetti is a doctoral student enrolled in the PhD program in English Literature, Language, and Translation Studies at Sapienza University of Rome (specialising in Literary and Cultural Studies), in joint collaboration with the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His doctoral project focuses on the intersection between the British novel and British Aestheticism in the long fin de siècle. He is a member of the Italian Oscar Wilde Society and the International Walter Pater Society.
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Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne), ‘Dowson in France: The Statute of Limitations in Poetic Translation’
Translation is the first means of literary dissemination. Periodicals, maybe more than books, are instrumental in disseminating translations across borders and fueling readers’ appetite for further work. However, that process may be interrupted or derailed for various reasons, some pertaining to the author, some to the translator(s), and others to editorial policies.
Decadent poet and prose-writer Ernest Dowson is a case in point for discussing the role of translation in literary recognition and dissemination. A Francophile, Dowson was partly educated in France, lived in Britany for a while, and translated prose and poetry from the French alike. In a time when periodical translations were almost simultaneous to the original publication, only a few of his poems were belatedly translated into French in short-lived reviews. My talk addresses those translations published in Le Prisme (1905-1906) and Vers et Prose (1905-1914), two periodicals strongly indebted to the fin de siècle literary ebullience. I also comment on the fate of translations into French of Dowson as a decadent poet.
Biography
Bénédicte Coste is Professor of Victorian Studies at the Université de Bourgogne. Her research focuses on ENG-FRE and FRE-ENG translations in French and British periodicals of the fin de siècle. With Dr Caroline Crépiat, she has developed the ‘Décabase’, a database of ENG-FRE translations into 10 generalist and literary French periodicals between 1880 and 1914.
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Simon Wilson (Independent Scholar), ‘Viewing Verses: Dowson and the Decadent Decorated Book’
Dowson’s Verses can be seen as one of a quartet of decorated books of the 1890s in which a key decadent text is presented in such a way as also to become an iconic decadent aesthetic object. Published in 1896, with a cover by Beardsley, it marks the climax of a development that begins with Wilde’s Dorian Gray designed by Charles Ricketts in 1891, followed by his Salome illustrated by Beardsley in 1894, and his Sphinx also designed by Ricketts, later in the same year.
Verses has an added dimension of decadence in its publisher Leonard Smithers. It is in fact the product of an unholy trinity of Smithers, Dowson, and Beardsley. Although Dowson’s diminutive volume appears on the face of it slight in comparison with those predecessors, it might, in the exquisite ephemerality of its pale, frail parchment boards, stamped in gold with Beardsley’s almost non-existent yet magisterial design, be considered the most truly decadent of them all.
Biography
Simon Casimir Wilson OBE MA is an independent writer and critic with a special interest in Aubrey Beardsley and the fin de siècle. His most recent publications include From Greek Youth to Flying Demon Angel, a study of the tomb of Oscar Wilde (2020), and Decadent Writings of Aubrey Beardsley co-edited with Sasha Dovzhyk and published by MHRA Jewelled Tortoise (2022). This includes a definitive scholarly edition, based on the original manuscript, of Beardsley’s notorious novella Under the Hill. ‘A notable event in the history of publishing [and] of nineteenth-century erotica’ (John Stokes in SWPA 8 2023).
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Robert Stilling (Florida State University), ‘The End of Every Song: Ernest Dowson, Apocalypticism, and The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World’ (via zoom)
In September of 2024, with the release of The Cure’s album Songs of a Lost World, Ernest Dowson was suddenly in the news. As the music press reported, it was in Dowson’s poem “Dregs” that The Cure found the inspiration for the album’s lead single “Alone.” As singer Robert Smith commented: “that was the moment when I knew the song – and the album – were real.” In the video and album art conceived by Smith and designed by Andy Vella, The Cure feature the work of Slovenian artist Janez Pirnat (1932-2021), whose sculpture “Bagatelle,” part unhewn rock, part archaic visage, hurtles like an asteroid toward earth. This presentation will argue that beyond the shared imagery of endings, regrets, and burnt-out inspiration, Smith updates Dowson’s “Dregs” with a 21st-century Anthropocene apocalypticism that takes the form of an antique, but revived aestheticism, which, like an ancient relic, threatens present destruction. Indeed, The Cure’s “lost world” isn’t the fading past of Dowson’s memory, but the present-day earth whose end times seem ever imminent, and whose past is catching up to it.
Biography
Robert Stilling is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University and author of Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Harvard UP, 2018).
This is a free event, and all are welcome to attend. However, to give us an idea of numbers, please register here.
Please email drc@gold.ac.uk with any queries about Ernest Dowson: Revived.
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‘Blind Chivvy’, drawn by Edmund Trueman for Dowson Day 2016. © https://edmundtruemanportfolio.wordpress.com
Conference Organisers
Jad Adams, Alice Condé, and Jessica Gossling