Posts tagged with ‘literature’

“Imperial expositions held in fin-de-siècle London, Paris and Berlin were knots in a world wide web. Conceptualizing expositions as meta-media, Fleeting Cities constitutes a transnational and transdisciplinary investigation into how modernity was created and displayed, consumed and disputed in the European metropolis around 1900.” ~Amazon description for Fleeting Cities: Imperial Expositions in Fin-de-Siecle Europe.

I look forward to this book (coming out in August, 2010). A review should be forthcoming…

projectgutenberg:

Pan stalked into the library and choosing, cat-like, the one spot he should have kept away from, curled up on a handsome book that was lying open on the table and forgot his troubles in sleep.

- Elizabeth Bonsall (illustrator) and Mabel Humphrey, The Book of the Cat (1903) [full text]

Another book to add to the must-read list: The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France - 1885 to World War I.

The front cover of “Our Village” by Miss Mitford; it is a dark greenish colour with gold flowers and gilt lettering.

(via: fuckyeahvictorians:yama-bato)

The Yellow Book, the periodical that famously featured Aubrey Beardsley as art editor, is now available full-text online at archive.org. Enjoy!

(via: i12bent)

French symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé: Mar. 18, 1842 - 1898

The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe

Such as eternity at last transforms into Himself,
The Poet rouses with two-edged naked sword,
His century terrified at having ignored
Death triumphant in so strange a voice!

They, like a spasm of the Hydra, hearing the angel
Once grant a purer sense to the words of the tribe,
Loudly proclaimed it a magic potion, imbibed
From some tidal brew black, and dishonourable.

If our imagination can carve no bas-relief
From hostile soil and cloud, O grief,
With which to deck Poe’s dazzling sepulchre,

Let your granite at least mark a boundary forever,
Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster,
To dark flights of Blasphemy scattered through the future.

Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford World’s Classics)

(Etching by Gaugain…)

Unbosoming

by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper: two women writing as one.)

The love that breeds
In my heart for thee!
As the iris is full, brimful of seeds,
And all that it flowered for among the reeds
Is packed in a thousand vermilion-beads
That push, and riot, and squeeze, and clip,
Till they burst the sides of the silver scrip,
And at last we see
What the bloom, with its tremulous, bowery fold
Of zephyr-petal at heart did hold:
So my breast is rent
With the burthen and strain of its great content;
For the summer of fragrance and sighs is dead,
The harvest-secret is burning red,
And I would give thee, after my kind,
The final issues of heart and mind.

Michael Field: The Poet