NEW BOOK: George Moore – Spheres of Influence
Laing, Kathryn and Mary Pierse, eds.
George Moore: Spheres of Influence | Liverpool: Liverpool University Press | forthcoming October 2023
This invigorating volume explores the literary worlds inhabited by the pioneering Irish author George Moore (1852–1933). With an eye to Moore’s innovative embrace of visual art, feminism and literary history, and in the spirit of his feisty resistance to ‘orthodoxy’, it investigates his influences and inventive strategies in novel, short story and memoir. Amongst the names emerging from the disparate spheres of impressionism, literary coteries, the paratextual and the music world are those of Manet, Mallarmé, Wilde, Héloïse, Elgar and Bourdieu, all with Moorian links. Contested depictions of religion and nationalism simmer; France and French influences encompass fin-de-siècle stories and mediaeval texts; epistolary details evidence vital parental support; contemporary authors write back to Moore. These voyages of discovery enter the fields of feminist scholarship and the New Woman, life writing and letters, fin-de-siècle aesthetics, intersections between art, music and literature, and literary transitions from Victorian to Modern. Valuably, the authors suggest numerous opportunities for additional research in these areas, as well as within Moore studies. This collection, with contributions from an international set of established and new scholars, delivers fresh and original findings as it builds on the substantial and ever-growing corpus of Moore studies.
| Table of contents Introduction |
| I. Artistic Influences and Approaches |
| The French Artist as Father, Muse and Rival in Memoirs of My Dead Life |
| Ann Heilmann |
| “Superfluous” Irish Gentry: Moore and Turgenev |
| Márta Pellérdi |
| Literature, Music, Art and the Salon: George Moore’s Perennial Courting of Creativity |
| Mary Pierse |
| The Prefaces of George Moore: Enigma Variations |
| Kathi R. Griffin |
| II. Cherchez la Femme? |
| Sphinxes without Secrets: Oscar Wilde, George Moore and the Woman Question |
| Nathalie Saudo Welby |
| George Moore, London ‘Literary Ladies’, Networks, and New Artistic Impulses |
| Kathryn Laing |
| The “Puzzle” of Gladys Parrish’s Carfrae’s Comedy and George Moore’s Evelyn Innes: Some Intertextual Connections |
| Brendan Fleming |
| III. France: Fiction and Letters |
| Between France and Ireland: How George Moore and Helen Waddell used Héloïse and Abélard |
| George Hughes |
| A French Train of Thought in ‘Two Men, a Railway Story’: From Impressionism to Expressionism |
| Michel Brunet |
| Epistolary Truths: ‘How one runs to ones mother when in trouble’ |
| Maggie Breslin |
| IV. Politics, Religion and Nationality |
| George Moore and Decadent Catholicism: a Case Study of Evelyn Innes |
| Claire Masurel Murray |
| George Moore’s Irish Catholic Characters With ‘English’ Names |
| David Clare |
| Appropriating George Moore: J.O. Hannay’s The Seething Pot |
| Conor Montague |
Kathryn Laing lectures in the Department of English Language and Literature, MIC, University of Limerick.
Mary Pierse, an independent scholar, formerly taught in the School of English at University College Cork.