STUDIES IN ANGLO-FRENCH CULTURAL RELATIONS Also by Ceri Crossley ALFRED DE MUSSET: 'LORENZACCIO' EDGAR QUINET (1803-75): A Study in Romantic Thought Also by Ian Small THE AESTHETES (editor) Oscar Wilde, LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN (editor) Oscar Wilde, TWO SOCIETY COMEDIES (editor) Walter Pater, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN (editor) Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations Imagining France Edited by Ceri Crossley Senior Lecturer in French University of Birmingham and Ian Small Lecturer in English University of Birmingham M MACMILLAN PRESS © Ceri Crossley and Ian Small1988 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1988 978-0-333-38971-3 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LT D Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Studies in Anglo-French cultural relations: imagining France. 1. Great Britain - Civilisation - French influence 2. Great Britain - Civilisation - 19th century 3. Great Britain - Civilisation- 20th century I. Crossley, Ceri H. Small, Ian 941.08 DAS33 ISBN 978-1-349-07923-0 ISBN 978-1-349-07921-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07921-6 Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on the Contributors viii Introduction Ceri Crossley and Ian Small 1 1 The Uses of Decadence: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce Richard Ellmann 17 2 The Reception of French Literature in England, 1885-1914 John J. Conlon 34 3 English Criticism and French Post-Impressionist Painting J. B. Bullen 47 4 France and the Construction of the Avant-Garde in Britain Ian Small 68 5 Arnold Bennett and the Desire for France Norma Rinsler 84 6 Rediscovering the French Eighteenth Century Ceri Crossley 102 7 A Diet of Dead Crow: Aspects of French Culture in the Criterion (192~39) Vanessa Davies 124 8 The Decline and Fall of Existentialism Colin Wilson 135 9 French Film Culture and British Cinema Jill Forbes 154 vi Contents 10 Althusserian Materialism in England Susan James 187 11 Home Thoughts from Abroad: Derrida, Austin and the Oxford Connection Christopher Norris 210 12 A Modern Writer's France John Fowles 236 Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Professors James Boulton and David Lodge for their help and advice in the planning of this volume. vii Notes on the Contributors J. B. Bullen is Lecturer in English at the University of Reading. He has written widely on English nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and artistic culture. His previous publications include an edition of Roger Fry's Vision and Design. John J. Conlon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He has written widely on English, European and Latin American literatures. He is the author of Walter Pater and the French Tradition. Ceri Crossley is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Edgar Quinet (1803-1875): A Study in Romantic Thought, Alfred de Musset: 'Lorenzaccio', and articles on intellectual history and comparative literature. Vanessa Davies is a research fellow at King's College, London. She is writing a study of the literary review Adam and is currently engaged in a descriptive cataloguing of the library and archive of Adam in the possession of King's College. Richard Ellmann was Professor of English at Emory University and formerly held the Goldsmiths' Chair of English at the Univer- sity of Oxford. His publications include The Identity of Yeats, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Eminent Domain and a biography of James Joyce. He was the editor of Joyce's Letters and of The New Oxford Book of American Verse. He died in 1987. Jill Forbes has taught at the Ecole Normale Superieure and been a Lecturer at the Universite de Paris III and the University of Lough- borough. She is currently head of Modern Languages at the South Bank Polytechnic. She has been a governor of the British Film Institute and a member of its production board. She is the editor of INA French for Innovation and the author of the forthcoming French Cinema since 1968. viii Notes on the Contributors ix John Fowles was born in 1926 and read French at New College, Oxford. His main novels are The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin and A Maggot; two of the stories in The Ebony Tower are set in France. Susan James is Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Girton College. She is the author of The Content of Social Explanation. Christopher Norris is Reader in English at the University of Wales in Cardiff. He has written extensively on various aspects of phil- osophy and literary theory. His publications include William Emp- son, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, The Deconstructive Turn and The Contest of Faculties. At present he is completing a book on Jacques Derrida. Norma Rinsler is Professor of French Language and Literature at King's College, London. She has published books on Nerval and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, especially poetry, and on comparative literature. Ian Small is Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham. His previous publications include The Aesthetes, editions of Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean and, with Russell Jackson, of Oscar Wilde's four society dramas. Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931. He left school at the age of sixteen and began to write a novel when he was seventeen. An offshoot of this novel, a study in 'existential sociology' called The Outsider, appeared when he was twenty-four and brought him overnight notoriety as an Angry Young Man'. The novel Ritual in I the Dark appeared in 1960. Wilson has written sixteen novels and forty works of non-fiction, including biographies of Shaw, Raspu- tin and Wilhelm Reich and the psychologist Abraham Maslow.