Marysa Demoor

• Professor
• Ghent University

Ten years is an important period. DiGeSt, the academic journal for gender and diversity studies, was launched ten years ago. The idea of the journal, however, took shape three years earlier the summer of 2011. Until then, the Centre for Gender studies at Ghent University published an annual yearbook, collecting the presentations of researchers main...

This essay traces the rise of the Lancet from its humble nineteenth-century beginnings to its current status as one of the most prestigious medical journals. By examining the Lancet 's early years and the hopes of founding editor Thomas Wakely and his successors, I aim to reveal what distinguished this journal from others circulating at the time an...

This book highlights the ways in which Britain and Belgium became culturally entangled as a result of their interaction in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. In the course of the nineteenth century, the battlefields of Waterloo and Ypres in Belgium became veritable burial grounds for generations of dead British military...

The Flemish iconography appealed to Rossetti because it illustrated that tenet which seems to have been a central one to his artistic credo: ut pictora poesis. The late Medieval paintings and illuminations had a strong narrative quality besides picturing and being direct testimonies to a time that absolutely entranced Rossetti. He as well as his yo...

In this chapter, I focus on artists who reacted to the battle of Waterloo by trying to capture the moment in paintings, engravings as well as in texts. Several writers saw it as an absolute necessity to travel across the Channel to see the battlefield for themselves. Walter Scott was one of the first to get to Waterloo. He used his observations and...

This chapter details the relationship between the British and the Belgian monarchy by relying on press cuttings and archival material that convincingly proves the unique closeness between the two royal families. The chapter continues with a comparison between Queen Victoria’s impressions of Belgium and its population and that left by Charlotte Bron...

This chapter returns more fully to war poetry and especially the context in which First World War poets wrote their poetry, i.e. in a suffocating mudscape. The chapter explains the unique quality of the mud in Flanders’ fields and the different, often comforting roles it assumed in much of the war-related literature. It ends with an exposition on L...

There is huge political power in the media. With human memory so shamefully short, the media carry the responsibility of reminding their readers of past alliances and relationships not to be forgotten, of wars that should not be fought again, of young men that gave their lives and were buried in near and far away countries.

The short epilogue wants to bring the different strands together once more with the help of Maurice Maeterlinck’s notes on the colour of nationalities.

In this chapter I present a new overview of the network of British and Belgian modernist writers of which Maurice Maeterlinck and Henry James are probably the best known. I also explore at length the network resulting from the friendship between Laurence Binyon and Olivier Destrée leading to a rekindling of a warm artistic relationship between Brit...

This chapter spotlights the significant role played by British art collectors and art connoisseurs such as James Weale. It dissects the shared fascination for the grotesque and the surreal among British and Belgian artists which left notable traces in some of the best-known illustrations to British literary tales. Conversely the chapter highlights...

This chapter looks at the different meanings of Britishness and Englishness as put forward in recent publications so as to contextualise my own definition of the concept. I then explain my take on nationality in the context of war cemeteries and war casualties by examining the association of nationality with the human body. Does nationality exist s...

After the 1815 battle a large number of authors in search of a subject and some memorable characters revisited the battlefield in fiction and poetry: W. M. Thackeray, D. G. Rossetti, and Frances Trollope. This chapter zooms in on a selection of those narratives that were sometimes less directly aimed at visiting the Waterloo dead and the battlefiel...

Academia is de biotoop van een prof. Ik maakte er 44 jaar deel van uit en dat is best lang. In mijn laatste werkjaar schreef ik elke maand een brief over mijn ervaringen en de emoties die ze toen en soms nu nog oproepen. De gebouwen van de universiteit passeren de revue net zo goed als markante figuren van diverse pluimage, vriendelijke en kwaadaar...

Against the backdrop of post-modernism and deconstruction, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an explosion of innovative theories and new research interests in Victorian studies that sometimes clashed and sometimes mixed to create new paths in literary theory and history. A global feminist recuperation project started off in the early seventies, alongsi...

While there were women journalists from the eighteenth century onwards their numbers grew substantially in the course of the nineteenth century. Women wrote mainly anonymously or pseudonymously, so the exact numbers of women actively involved in journalism are unknown, but they succeeded to prove themselves at every stage of the production of the p...

The modern Chinese term “zuo zhe” (author) is derived from the ancient word “zuo,” meaning to compose, to do, or to engage in – all commanding a notion of power and authority. These semantic threads collectively underpin the long-standing contention that Chinese authorship began with Confucius. Mencius (390–305 BCE) was the first person to claim th...

Any discussion of postmodernist authorship must proceed from a reasonably firm understanding of postmodernism, or at least postmodernist literature. Unfortunately, there is not much of a consensus on these concepts and their implications. Before approaching postmodernist authorship, it is therefore necessary to provide a brief overview of the most...

We now imagine ourselves to be living in an age of nearly frictionless authorship, one in which ideas – both wild and mundane – can be instantly published on a blog, in a Facebook comment, or on platforms from Reddit to Amazon that thrive on what we still awkwardly refer to as “self-published” manuscripts. Authorship – whether defined broadly as th...

This article is situated at the crossroads of First World War and periodical studies. It sheds light on the phenomenon of ‘war godmothers’ [‘marraines’], women who supported soldiers at the front by sending them parcels and letters. The so-called godmothers made use of the mainstream press to advertise their services, and founded periodicals of the...

This comparative essay focuses on a small set of representative publications created on the Western front, including the Wipers Times (British army), Bellica, Le Bochofage and Le Poilu du 6-9 (French army) and Antwerpen en Omheining, Ik ben Roeland and Saint-Trond Poilufié (Belgian army). First, it explores the production context of Entente magazin...

Full text available at http://scholarlyediting.org/2016/editions/BinyonDestree.html

Available at https://scholarlyediting.org/2016/editions/BinyonDestree.html This edition makes available unpublished letters exchanged between British writer, critic, and curator Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) and Belgian poet-critic Olivier-Georges Destrée (1867–1919), written mostly in English and French, but also incorporating other languages. (Rob...

This article described the rise (and fall) of the centre for gender studies at Ghent University (Belgium) and the achievements of the group in terms of equal opportunity policy. It also points to the dangers of conflicting generations with the young generations of female academics not acknowledging the work of the preceding generations and sometime...

This article focuses on the role of periodicals in the creation of Waterloo as a British realm of memory, demonstrating how Waterloo became Waterloo. It examines David Wilkie’s painting The Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, zooms in on writings about the battlefield, and then explores the ways in which contemporary journals and news...

On June 18, 1815, three armies confronted each other on a large plain fifteen kilometers to the south of Brussels between the villages of Waterloo, Braine L’Alleud (Eigenbrakel), and Plancenoit. The commanding officers on the allied side were the Duke of Wellington and Prince Blücher, whose armies represented six nations; the leader on the French s...

This article argues that Charlotte Brontë effected a thorough mediation of Emily Brontë's authorial image after her death by becoming her sister's editor. For the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte extensively edited Emily's poetry and wrote an influential 'Biographical Notice' and 'Preface'. She also composed new lines for...

Edmund William Gosse (1849–1928) was a man of letters and son of the natural historian and proto‐creationist Philip Gosse. He did not go to university because his father was wary of a secular environment and the influence of young male students. But Gosse nevertheless became an influential literary critic and the author of fiction, poetry, and some...

Andrew Lang (1844–1912), poet and scholar, novelist and translator, anthropologist and historian, journalist and folklorist, was one of the most prolific men of letters of the second half of the nineteenth century. Ironically, Lang is now remembered mainly for the coloured “fairy books” that were largely the work of his wife, Leonora Lang. Lang's m...

Michael Wolff with Marysa Demoor. Photo credit: Marianne Van Remoortel View full resolution Michael, one of the keynote addresses at our annual conference is named for you. How did you come to be one of the founding fathers of Victorian periodical studies? There was an extraordinary amount of material nobody had really studied, and I became one of...

This article is situated at the crossroads of First World War and periodical studies. It sheds light on the phenomenon of the War-godmothers (marraines), women who supported soldiers at the front by sending them parcels and letters. The so-called godmothers made use of the mainstream press to adver-tise their services, and founded periodicals of th...

This article will claim that Laurence Binyon deserves a reassessment for two reasons: his critical work has echoes in the poetic theory of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and, secondly, he was a pivotal figure for the avant-garde in Britain. Although Binyon started his career in the late Victorian period and his work may not appear to diverge from that...

Introduction to the fifth issue of Authorship .

This paper highlights an unknown but important episode in the life of the journalist W. T. Stead, which, intriguingly, remained unmentioned in Belgian, British, and colonial historiography. It concerns a face-to-face meeting between Stead and Leopold II, King of the Belgians, which certainly did not leave Stead the ‘friend of all Kings’, as the pos...

In one of his eager attempts to impose classifications on poetry, Ezra Pound, in 1914, identified a kind of verse in which “sheer melody seems as if it were just bursting into speech” (Gaudier-Brzeska 82). Such melopoeic poetry, as he labeled it elsewhere, was not a marginal curiosity, he claimed, but “marked only the best lyric periods” (Selected...

The aim of this article is to discuss the new editor of the influential weekly Athenaeum after Norman Maccoll’s resignation. The editorships during the early decades of the Athenaeum have been discussed in several publications already and the journal’s influence and policy under Norman Maccoll is well-known and has been examined in overviews such a...

There is a curious and funny anecdote in J.W. Mackail's biography of William Morris which tells of how Morris and his family travelled through Flanders from Ghent to Bruges on a beautifully sunny day in 1874 and then halted in the town of Eeklo in order to have dinner. There Morris, realizing that the inn-keeper could not understand either French o...

Ethan Frome has been criticized for its narratological construction, which is as challenging now as ever. The challenge arises through the employment of one narrator to relate both the main story and the frame story, which takes place 24 years prior. But this narrator is an outsider to Starkfield, and his story relies on tight-lipped remarks provid...

This article proposes a performative model of authorship, based on the historical alternation between predominantly 'weak' and 'strong' author concepts and related practices of writing, publication and reading. Based on this model, we give a brief overview of the historical development of such author concepts in English literature from the Middle A...

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the narrative ballad was a conservative genre, understood as a creation of the "common folk"; by mid-century the ballads, in ostensibly authoritative versions, were being repackaged for a middle-class urban audience. In diverse illustrated editions intended for a variety of readerships, these volumes are...

Welcome to the first issue of the open-access online journal Authorship.

In this article, the authors discuss evolutionary thought as it manifests itself in the literary works of the (Flemish) Belgian writer Virginie Loveling (1836-1923). By introducing certain aspects of the evolutionary ideologies popular in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Loveling fulfilled a mediating role in the production and...

On September 11, 2008, 10:11 a.m., at a New York City ceremony honouring victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani concluded his speech with a quote from the poem “For the Fallen.” Mr. Giuliani spoke the words with a certain flair, respecting the cadence, stressing the right words, and honouring the pauses: They sha...

In 1839, one of the oil paintings on display at the Annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London was The Sonnet by the Irish-born artist William Mulready (1786-1863). The oil on panel, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, shows a young man and woman sitting at the waterside, surrounded by a landscape of light greens, browns, and yellows. Dres...

An advertisement in the 1 May 1897 issue of the weekly Academy encourages potential readers to look inside its pages, proclaiming that “A Portrait Supplement of unique interest is given with each issue of The Academy.” A reader, even in the present day, will undoubtedly search for a pictorial item only to find that the supplement is not a visual po...

The Dorothy Novelette and its supplements were part of a sub-genre of weekly penny periodicals which were dominant in British publishing in the last 25 years of the nineteenth century. The evolution of the Dorothy from a ‘complete story’ novelette into an early modern women's magazine during the 1890s resulted as its features changed to attract rea...

The two most prominent Aestheticist or Decadent literary magazines in the 1890s were the Yellow Book and the Savoy. Both arguably drew inspiration from the coterie publication the Dial, which for the first time brought together the eclectic sources of their editorial aesthetic. The later Dome can be seen as a more consistently successful yet also l...

When Norman MacColl's thirty-year editorship of the Athenaeum ended in December 1900, there was little to indicate that this prestigious Victorian weekly had started a slow downward spiral drawn out through successive editors, changes in the cultural scene, and the war, all contributing to its inevitable demise in 1921. The next two editors, the fa...

In its launch number of May 1842 Britain's most successful illustrated weekly newspaper, the Illustrated London News, crowed triumphantly 'For the past ten years we have watched with admiration and enthusiasm the progress of illustrative art, and the vast revolution which it has wrought in the world of publication….To the wonderful march of periodi...

By the mid-1840s, as the implications of wood engraving, the Daguerreotype, and the illustrated press were set out by their detractors and champions, feelings ran high, as the epigraphs suggest. Were wood engravings a welcome technique of popular and wholesome education, extending the benefits of beauty and/or usefulness to working-class readers, o...

This essay argues that the theory of confession, even in its most recent elaboration by Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), is in need of substantial revision, as the current understanding of confession as an address to the other cannot account for the new kinds of confession that are proliferating on the internet. Focusing on the...

This article focuses on the correlation between the gender of authors and the winners of literary awards in Flanders in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The hypothesis is that the chances of winning such an award are different for male and female writers. The article will investigate the reasons for this imbalance. The authors look at...

The confrontation of the concepts of modernism and democracy in the title of this book seems an obvious one, especially considering the fact that the two movements came into being simultaneously and were famously considered to be at odds with one another for most of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the two terms are difficult to gr...

The weekly journals and the specialized periodicals were interrelated in important ways. If they did not always compete for the same readers, they may be said to have issued from adjoining shops in Grub Street and Paternoster Row. They borrowed shamelessly from one another, attacked and supplemented one another, and followed parallel procedures. Th...

In case-based reasoning (CBR), a new untreated case is compared to cases that have been treated earlier, after which data from the similar cases (if found) are used to predict the corresponding unknown data values for the new case. Because case comparisons will seldom result in an exact-similarity matching of cases and the conventional CBR approach...