INTRODUCTION

• Published in: DQR studies in literature 2013-01, Vol.51, p.1
• Main Authors: Huguet, Christine, Dabrigeon-Garcier, Fabienne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dickens, Charles (1812-1870); Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900)
• ISSN: 0921-2507

An avowed aim of the Lille conference was to address a major challenge raised by the Moore corpus and examine the distinctive trait which, already in the writer's lifetime, generated heated controversy, and after his death helped for decades to damage his reputation as an artist - his unabashed eclecticism. If English and Irish literary and cultural studies are still dominantly represented, subject specialism necessarily becomes flexible in the case of Moore scholarship. [...]those essays looking at the writer's awareness of late Victorian aesthetics or again at his links with contemporary big names - Thomas Hardy or W.B. Yeats - establish interesting points of contact with gender studies, sociology and history when, for instance, they genderize Moore's fiction or bring medical and sociological criteria to bear on his work. The combined references to contemporary musical trends in their relation to the sister arts, painting and writing, but also, more originally, to architecture and even the less familiar artistic fields - furniture-making, ceramics, photography, jewellery, stained glass and the making of such varied artefacts as clocks, textiles and wallpaper - bespeak Moore's eagerness to probe the complex relationship between art and reality. After carefully documenting the quarrel and closely examining each writer's contribution, Cantwell comes to the conclusion that the preposterous division of labour initially agreed on - Moore providing the scenario of the play, Yeats writing the dialogue and putting style in - could not aptly settle the complex issues of artistic property and of each writer's authority over the destiny of the collaborative project.