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Giles WhiteleyProfessor

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Professor i litteraturvetenskap vid Engelska institutionen.

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Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907

    2020. Giles Whiteley.

    Bok

    Charting an ‘aesthetic’, post-realist tradition of writing, this book considers the significant role played by John Ruskin’s art criticism in later writing which dealt with the new kinds of spaces encountered in the nineteenth-century. With chapters devoted to the ways in which aesthetic and decadent writers such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde built upon and challenged Ruskin’s ideas, the book links the late Dickens to the early modernism of Henry James. The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature gives a vibrant vision of what an aesthetically sensitive treatment of these spaces looked like during the period.

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  • Schelling’s Reception in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

    2018. Giles Whiteley.

    Bok

    This book examines the various ways in which the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling was read and responded to by British readers and writers during the nineteenth century. Challenging the idea that Schelling’s reception was limited to the Romantics, this book shows the ways in which his thought continued to be engaged with across the whole period. It follows Schelling’s reception both chronologically and conceptually as it developed in a number of different disciplines in British aesthetics, literature, philosophy, science and theology. What emerges is a vibrant new history of the period, showing the important role played by reading and responding to Schelling, either directly or more diffusely, and taking in a vast array of major thinkers during the period. This book, which will be of interest not only to historians of philosophy and the history of ideas, but to all those dealing with Anglo-German reception during the nineteenth century, reveals Schelling to be a kind of uncanny presence underwriting British thought.

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  • Oscar Wilde and the Simulacrum

    2015. Giles Whiteley.

    Bok

    Oscar Wilde is more than a name, more than an author. From precocious Oxford undergraduate to cause célèbre of the West End of the 1890s, to infamous criminal, the proper name Wilde has become an event in the history of literature and culture. Taking Wilde seriously as a philosopher in his own right, Whiteley’s groundbreaking book places his texts into their philosophical context in order to show how Wilde broke from his peers, and in particular from idealism, and challenges recent neo-historicist readings of Wilde which seem content to limit his irruptive power. Using the paradoxical concept of the simulacrum to resituate Wilde’s work in relation to both his precursors and his contemporaries, Whiteley’s study reads Wilde through Deleuze and postmodern philosophical commentary on the simulacrum. In a series of striking juxtapositions, Whiteley challenges us to rethink both Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics and his philosophy, to take seriously both the man and the mask. His philosophy of masks is revealed to figure a truth of a different kind — the simulacra through which Wilde begins to develop and formulate a mature philosophy that constitutes an ethics of joy.

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  • Shakespeare, Influence and Appropriation

    2022. Giles Whiteley. The Palgrave Handbook of Gothic Origins, 23-50

    Kapitel

    Surveying recent interest in the various intersections of Shakespeare and the gothic, this chapter considers three aspects of these points of convergence. It considers the role played by Shakespeare in the early gothic of writers such as Walpole and Radcliffe, and in the course of this discussion, also considers Shakespeare’s role in mid-eighteenth-century nationalist political debates, in which the idea of a ‘gothic’ heritage developed at around the same time as Bardology: Shakespeare was appropriated as a ‘gothic’ writer anachronistically by Whig historians. The chapter then gives attention to the topic and imagery in Shakespeare’s theatre which came to fascinate later writers of the gothic, including his representation of the supernatural and ‘unnatural’, dreams, ghosts and madness. The chapter briefly concludes by considering some of the ways in which Shakespeare would be appropriated by later writers of the gothic tradition in the nineteenth century and beyond.

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  • Joris-Karl Huysmans, Decadence, Satanism and Catholicism

    2021. Giles Whiteley. The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, 595-611

    Kapitel

    This chapter focuses on J.-K. Huysmans’ contributions to nineteenth-century gothic literature. Contextualising his work as a response to naturalism and its ‘materialism’, the chapter reads in detail the gothic of Huysmans’ decadent period. À rebours [Against Nature] examines the ennui of living at the end of the nineteenth century, and in its arresting dream sequences, allegorises the condition of modernity as a degeneration of the species. In asking whether Christianity can satisfy the subject’s spiritual demands at the fin de siècle, À rebours compares to Là-Bas [The Damned], set in the world of contemporary Satanism. The chapter focuses on Huysmans’ links to the world of the Parisian occult, before concluding with a brief discussion of La Cathédrale, a novel written after Huysmans’ conversion to Catholicism. This interest in a world ‘beyond’ links Huysmans’ novels of decadent gothic to those chronicling his spiritual conversion.

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  • Romantic Irony

    2021. Giles Whiteley. The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology, 341-360

    Kapitel

    Thomas Carlyle’s novel, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), has puzzled audiences since its first publication. Constituting one of the most ambitious attempts to put into practice Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of romantic irony in the Anglophone tradition, the novel is curiously resistant to interpretation. This chapter begins by considering how irony in general may be read through humour theory, before addressing the problem of understanding romantic irony in particular. It considers the critical heritage on romantic irony, in particular as represented by the interventions of G.W.F. Hegel and Paul de Man, which has traditionally marginalised the humour in Schlegel’s theory and in romantic irony in general, instead prioritising its ‘serious’ and philosophical qualities. Against this received view, the chapter suggests ways in which Schlegel’s ‘transcendental buffoonery’ is instead conceived of as a humorous experience in which the irony calls the romantic subject into question. The chapter then reads Sartor Resartus as a case study of romantic irony, contextualising the problems inherent in ‘getting’ this kind of humour, both for the Victorian audience who first read the novel and for the modern ones who seek to unpack it.

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  • 'A Memnon waiting for the day'

    2020. Giles Whiteley. Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt, 139-161

    Kapitel

    This chapter turns to ancient Egypt in the literature of the aesthetic and decadent movements, exploring how this differs from the so-called classical ‘ideal’ of Greece and Rome. Beginning with Baudelaire’s influential use of ancient Egypt in the ‘Spleen’ poems of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), it locates three interrelated, but also competing and seemingly contradictory, discursive deployments of ancient Egypt in literature of the period: firstly, in an argument derived from Hegel’s Aesthetics (1818–29), Egypt as ‘Symbolic’ mystery, whose art is underdeveloped by comparison to the ‘Classical Ideal’, waiting for the day of the ‘Greek spirit … with its power of speech’; secondly, Egypt as a site of ennui, where the ‘symbolic’ dimensions are linked intrinsically to a melancholic decadence and to death; and thirdly, Egypt as exoticism, and Orientalist sensuality, linking also to the significance of contemporary fin-de-siècle Egypt in homosexual culture. This chapter examines Walter Pater’s essay on ‘Winckelmann’ from The Renaissance (1873), and Oscar Wilde’s poem The Sphinx (1894) amongst other materials to argue that ancient Egypt was a marginal but nevertheless significant subject for the aesthetes and decadents.

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  • Henry Longueville Mansel's Phrontisterion (1852)

    2018. Giles Whiteley. Victorian literature and culture (Print) 46 (2), 485-514

    Artikel

    Established in 1859, as a merger of the Whigs, Radicals and Peelites, the British Liberal Party and their ideological forerunners won 15 out of a total of 20 parliamentary elections between 1832–1910. Responsible for passing socially progressive legislation domestically, Victorian liberalism can lay claim to being the most significant political ideology of the period. By bringing together aspects of classical social liberalism and liberal free-market conservatism, this specifically Victorian brand of liberalism enabled Britain to take a place at the center of world affairs. Indeed, by the mid-1850s, the emergence of Victorian liberalism had begun to be seen as something of a political necessity, as demonstrated by Thomas Babington Macaulay's The History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–61), a foundational text of Whig historicism, in which Lord Charles Grey's 1832 Reform Bill was characterized as the teleological culmination of British history. But while the liberals styled themselves as progressives and their opponents as reactionaries, Whig history has tended to oversimplify the dynamics of this narrative. In this context, Henry Longueville Mansel's closet drama Phontisterion offers a fascinating glimpse into a contemporary Tory response to the seemingly irresistible rise of Victorian liberalism.

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  • Pater’s Heraclitus

    2017. Giles Whiteley. Pater the classicist, 261-273

    Kapitel

    This chapter examines Pater’s reading of Heraclitus as it developed through his career, from the conclusion to the Renaissance onwards. Setting Pater’s classicism in dialogue with his comments on the ‘historical method’ in Plato and Platonism, the chapter contextualises Pater’s discussion of Heraclitus alongside that of his friend Ingram Bywater and nineteenth century German traditions, and particularly Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. From Marius onward, Pater rereads Heraclitus, distancing himself from a ‘popular’ image of the philosophy of flux, emphasising terms such as ‘logos’ and ‘harmony’, before discussing the philosopher’s political significance in Plato and Platonism. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Pater’s classicism as it is exemplified in his reading of Heraclitus, always a reading proceeding through the prism of other readings, is somewhat ‘ironic’, always displaced.

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  • The Tree of Knowledge

    2017. Giles Whiteley. Katherine Mansfield and Russia, 175-189

    Kapitel

    This chapter examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

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