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Our editorial method is informed by social-text editing principles. By “text” we mean verbal and visual printed material, including non-referential physical elements such as bindings, page layouts, and ornaments. We view any text as the outcome of collaborative processes that have specific manifestations at precise historical moments. The Yellow Nineties Online publishes facsimile editions of a select collection of fin-de- siècle aesthetic periodicals, together with paratexts of production and reception such as cover designs, advertising materials, and reviews. This historical material is enhanced by two kinds of peer-reviewed scholarly commentary: biographies of the periodicals’ contributors and associates; and critical introductions to each title and volume by experts in the field. All scholarly material on the site is vetted by the editor(s) and peer- reviewed by them and/or an international board of advisors. The site as a whole is peer- reviewed by NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship). Contributors to the site retain personal copyright in their material. The site is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. Both primary and secondary materials, including all visual images, are marked up in TEI- (Textual-Encoding Initiative) compliant XML (Extensible Markup Language). To ensure maximum flexibility for users, magazines are available on the site as virtual objects (facsimiles) in FlipBook form; in HTML for online reading; in PDF for downloading and collecting; and in XML for those who wish to review and/or adapt our tag sets. In order to make ornamental devices, such as initial letters, head- and tail- pieces, searchable, we have developed a Database of Ornament in OMEKA, and linked it to the relevant pages of each magazine edition. As a dynamic structure, a scholarly website is always in process; Phase One of The Yellow Nineties Online (2010-2015) is completed and Phase Two (2016-2021) is underway.
Arthur Symons was one of the key exponents of Symbolism in Britain. During the fin de siècle he built an impressive intellectual and social network that comprised the most prominent figures of the age, including Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), Mathilde Blind (1841-1896), Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), Havelock Ellis, Michael Field, Herbert Horne (1864-1916), George Moore (1852-1933), Walter Pater (1839-1894), Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893). Symons grew up in the West of England and attended various schools before embarking on a literary career at the young age of seventeen with a study of Robert Browning (1812-1889). He became an extremely productive critic, journalist, poet and playwright.
The 1890s marked the height of Symons’s success. The decade started with a prolonged
stay in Paris with Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) that was to have a deep impact on
Symons, who fell in love with the city and became increasingly interested in French
writers. He would soon establish himself as one of the leading experts of French
literature and the foremost cultural mediator between England and France. It was
during this period that Symons wrote some of his most influential works. “The
Decadent Movement in Literature” — published in 1893 but later revised,
renamed, and republished in book form as
His early criticism and his prose style show the influence of Pater, who advised
Symons that he should dedicate himself to the art of prose writing rather than poetry
— the same advice he had offered to the young Wilde. Highly though he held
Pater’s opinion, Symons disregarded this advice. In the early 1890s he came into
contact with the Rhymers’ Club, where he made the acquaintance of Ernest Dowson (1867-1900), Lionel Johnson
(1867-1902), Richard Le Gallienne (1866-1947) and W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). Symons developed an individual style
in verse, clearly inspired by the French authors he knew so well. His poetry, in
collections like
Symons contributed poetry to the first and third volumes of
Symons suffered a mental breakdown in 1908 but he soon resumed his incessant activity, publishing extensively before his death in 1945. After his illness, though, Symons led a more retiring life. He was not in touch with the new literary trends that were developing in those years, and much of his late work consists in fact of revisions to earlier material. Symons’s work is often seen as a bridge between late-Victorian writing and the new modernist aesthetics of the early twentieth century represented by experimental writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Symons was also a translator of influential modern French and Italian authors, among them Charles Baudelaire, Emile Verhaeren, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.
© 2011, Stefano Evangelista
Stefano Evangelista is Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College and Lecturer in
English at the University of Oxford. He is the author of