Catherine Delyfer

Catherine Delyfer is currently Professor of English at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. A former editor of the French journal of Victorian studies, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (2010-2015), she now co-directs the research seminar “Les Jeudis du Genre” within her research centre, “Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes” and regularly organizes conferences in word and image studies (“Gold in/and Art” in 2014, “Cross-Dressing in Fiction and in Fact” in 2017, “Female Suffrage in Art, Literature and History” in 2018).  Her publications focus on fin-de-siècle culture, gender, and the interplay between texts and images, between literature and painting, or between painting or literature and music. She has written essay on such aesthetes as Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, Gleeson White or James McNeill Whistler and on the fin-de-siecle decorative arts periodical The Studio. She is also particularly interested in neglected late-Victorian female writers and artists, whose work bridges the gap between Aestheticism and Modernism (Lucas Malet, Marie Corelli, Victoria Cross, Jessie Marion King).

Selected publications

Books

  • Art and Womandhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: The Fiction of Lucas Malet, 1880-1931. Londres: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.
  • Enjeux du discours idéologique dans une revue d’art : étude de The Studio (1893-1900). Villeneuve d’Ascq : PU du Septentrion, 1999.

Edited books and journal issues

Articles and book chapters

  • “The Illustrator as Critic: Desire, Curiosity and the Myth of Persephone in Jessie M. King’s Illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies  28 (Spring 2019).
  • “Solidarités iconotextuelles, genre et pouvoir dans “The Young King” d’Oscar Wilde illustré par Jessie Marion King (1915),” Image&Narrative 19.2 (2018), 5-22
  • “Cosmopolitan Romance and Feminist Aestheticism in Lucas Malet’s Adrian Savage (1911)”, in J. Ford and A. Gray eds. Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays (Londres: Routledge, 2018).
  • “Speculating on Art in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction”, in B. Coste, C. Delyfer and C. Reynier eds. Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: continuities, revisions, speculations (Londres: Routledge, 2017), pp. 165-174.
  • “Re-writing myths of creativity: Pygmalionism, Galatea figures, and the revenge of the muse in fin-de-siècle literature by women”, in Holly Laird (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1880-1920, London: Palgrave Macmillan (History of British Women’s Writing Series, volume 7), 2016, pp. 111-126.
  • “The Aesthete, the Banker, and the Saint: Economies of Gift and Desire in Lucas Malet’s The Far Horizon (1906)”, in Jane Ford, Patricia Pulham and Kim Edwards Keates (eds.), Libidinal Lives: Economies of Desire at the Fin-de-Siècle: Libidinal Lives, Londres: Routledge (Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature Series), 2016, pp. 122-142.
  • “Golden alchemies: gold in British art and literature”, Polysèmes 15 (2016).
  • « Visible, invisible, visuel : spectralité et hantologie dans The Gateless Barrier (1900) de Lucas Malet », Polysèmes 13 (2015).
  • « Les monstres d’Aubrey Beardsley et le “grotesque darwinien” », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 77 (avril 2013).
  • « Gleeson White », The Yellow Nineties Online, in D. Denisoff and L. Janzen Kooistra (dirs.), Ryerson University, 2013.
  • « The Studio and the Craftsman as Artist : A Study in Periodical Poetics (1893-1900) », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 71 (2010), pp. 437-451.
  • « Voir la musique chez J. M. W. Whistler », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 59 (2004), pp. 45-63.