At the Heart of the 1890s

Widely recognized in his own time as a poet of the highest order, Lionel Johnson has since been largely overshadowed by critical interest in some of the brighter luminaries of the fin de siècle literary moment, such as Wilde and Yeats. In At the Heart of the 1890s: Essays on Lionel Johnson, Gary H. Paterson compensates for some of that neglect, aiming to restore Johnson to his deserved position at the center of the 1890s literary world.

The eleven essays comprising At the Heart of the 1890s engage Johnson’s poetry in detail, offering a comprehensive and broadly conceived critical portrait of the writer and his times. While giving ample critical attention to the familiar topics of Johnson’s religiosity and homosexuality in the context of late nineteenth-century literary decadence, Paterson also devotes much of his study to an exploration of less critically considered “aspects of character,” including Johnson’s sense of humor, his interest in music, and his fascination with Celtic history and culture.

Contents
Preface
Lionel Johnson: A Bio-Bibliographical Note
Lionel Johnson and the 1890s
Mystic More than Cavalier: Lionel Johnson’s Religious Thought
“Church of a Dream”: The Religious Poetry of Lionel Johnson
Lionel Johnson and Arthur H. Clough: An Ironic Debt?
Light and Darkness, Sound and Silence in Lionel Johnson’s Poetry
Lionel Johnson’s Melancholy Music
Lionel Johnson: Humorist
Lionel Johnson and the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name
Arnoldian? Paterian? The Aesthetic of Lionel Johnson
Lionel Johnson’s Celtic Twilight
Works Cited
Index