Ann Ardis

E. M. Hull, Mass Market Romance and the New Woman Novel in the Early Twentieth Century

ABSTRACT This essay explores the legacy of fin‐de‐siecle New Woman fiction to early twentieth‐century mass market romance novels. While suffrage campaigners “banished the beast” of sexuality from their agendas in order to secure the respectability of “The Cause”, popular romance novelists such as E. M. Hull continued the work ofjin‐de‐siecle New Woman writing ‐ writing about sexuality, reworking the romance plot, and renegotiating womens access to the public sphere.

New Women and the New Hellenism

During the great age of English university reform, Hellenism, the systematic study of Greek history, literature, and philosophy, served as a crucial means of both liberalizing classical republican political discourse and establishing the basis for a ‘homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms’.1 As Linda Dowling has noted, the revisionary Greek ideal lying at the centre of Oxford Hellenism was ‘the purest model of Victorian liberalism itself’, promising to ‘restore and reinvigorate a nation fractured by the effects of laissez-faire capitalism and enervated by the approach of mass democracy’ (Dowling, 79, 31). But Oxford Hellenism also ‘provide[d] the means of sweeping away the entire accumulation of negative associations with male love which had remained strong through the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (Dowling, 79). ‘[T]riumphantly proclaiming’ male love to be ‘the very fountain of civic health in a polity that [was] urged to take as its cultural model the ancient city-state of Athens’, key figures in the Oxford reform movement such as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds sought to realize the Platonic doctrine of eros, whereby an older man, ‘moved to love by the visible beauty of a younger man, and desirous of winning immortality through that love, undertakes the younger man’s education in virtue and wisdom’ (Dowling, 79, 81). Arguing that Oscar Wilde’s passionate defence of male love as ‘pure’ and ‘perfect’ and ‘intellectual’ during the final moments of his first trial in 1895 can best be understood in the context of this larger history of Victorian Hellenism, Dowling charts the very complex genealogy of Wilde’s Platonic language regarding male love in a ‘crucial moment in the modern emergence of homosexuality as a positive social identity’ (Dowling, 4).

Modernizing the Female Subject@@@Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction in England

Impressionist Subjects looks at the way modernist writers wrote about how the mind works, and connects those ideas to the way that women moved into public life in the early 20th century.

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature

This treatise describes the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. It describes how modernists have rebelled against the standard image, reimagining themselves as racial aliens and mimicking the strategies of dialect speakers. At the same time, African-American writers have struggled to free themselves from dialect as it has been rendered by white dialect writers.