Book Description

1994 marked the centenary of the deaths of Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beauty and the Beast is largely devoted to an exploration of aspects of their lives and their writings, and the role they played in the development of British literature. Both individually and as a group, these writers offer interesting opportunities to investigate a distinctive ambivalence in the literature of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Thus we may observe how Pater as the founder of Aestheticism in British literature addressed the Victorian dilemma how to live in Marius the Epicurean; how Rossetti's poetry expresses both spiritual and erotic tendencies, while Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is perhaps the epitome of the fin-de-siècle tension between good and evil, beauty and beast. Yet the scope of this book also includes an examination of the relationships between these three authors and their contemporaries, and of their setting, on the British Isles as well as on the Continent. Thus George Moore makes his appearance, next to Anton Chekhov, Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde, Alain Fournier and Louis Couperus. The various discussions of these French, German, Russian, Italian, Irish and Dutch connections in this book reflect the international setting of the European fin-de-siècle as a background against which the theme of Beauty and the Beast is discussed. Contributors are: Wim Tigges, C.C. Barfoot, Jan Marsh, Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Amanda Gilroy, Peter van de Kamp, Billie Andrew Inman, Laurel Brake, Peter Costello, Ans Kabel, Douglas S. Mack, Tim Youngs, Neil Cornwell, Sjef Houppermans, Jacques B.H. Alblas, John Stokes, Susan de Sola Rodstein.