Light on the dark angel: Lionel Johnson and the literary life of the 1890s
August 2019
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Journal article
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TLS - The Times Literary Supplement
FFR
Impotence and the Male Artist: The Case of George Moore
March 2019
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Journal article
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Journal of Victorian Culture
FFR
The problem of sex in J. M. Barrie's fiction
January 2017
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Journal article
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English Literature in Transition 1880-1920
A euphemistic, biographically supported reading of Tommy’s failure to “love” in Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel, has profoundly affected subsequent analyses of the novels and interpretations of Barrie’s thinking about both sexuality and art. This discussion begins by examining the difference that Barrie establishes between love and sexual passion in his early novels, before showing how he places this difference within a wider theory of human nature, in which sexual passion is both admitted as necessary and worried about as potentially destructive. The implications this has for Barrie’s consideration of artistic sexuality in the Tommy novels are then analysed, revealing the potential dangers of euphemistic readings which erroneously seek meaning from beyond rather than within the text.