CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Volume 7, Issue 2 (Autumn 2024)

Women of The Yellow Book

In collaboration with the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths and the British Association of Decadence Studies (BADS); guest edited by Dr Lucy Ella Rose and Louise Wenman-James (University of Surrey).

The Autumn 2024 special issue of Volupté will celebrate women who were involved with The Yellow Book. This was the British quarterly periodical, published by The Bodley Head between 1894 and 1897, that was notoriously associated with decadence and lent its name to the ‘Yellow Nineties’. Contemporary reviews often fail to appreciate the vital part women played in the periodical’s run. In The Cosmopolitan, poet and critic Andrew Lang claimed that The Yellow Book was ‘an advertisement, or manifesto, of several ingenious young men’ (1894, p. 373), and an anonymous reviewer called it ‘the Oscar Wilde of periodicals’ (1894, p. 360).

These androcentric reviews have played a part in the marginalisation of women’s artistic and literary contributions to The Yellow Book, and yet it is impossible to ignore the importance of women therein. As Talia Schaffer notes in her seminal text Forgotten Female Aesthetes, ‘over one-third of the pieces in the Yellow Book were by women [and] the Yellow Book ran an article on women’s fiction in each of its first three issues. This editorial decision positioned women’s writing as an integral part of aestheticism’ (2000, p. 23). The aim of this special issue is to further bring to light the lives and works of women who contributed in various ways to The Yellow Book, as well as the connections and dialogues between them, drawing out their networks and communities at the fin de siècle.

We welcome submissions on themes relating to women’s work in and around The Yellow Book including but not limited to:

·       Female decadence
·       The visual culture of The Yellow Book
·       Decadent and aesthetic networks
·       Connections and partnerships between women
·       Professionalisation
·       Periodical culture
·       Transgression
·       Gender identity
·       Sexual identity

All contributions will need to be submitted by 31 March 2024 for publication in the September 2024 issue. Articles should be about 6-7,000 words in length, including endnotes, and book reviews should be no more than 2,000 words. All textual material must be in Microsoft Word format and follow the MHRA Style Guide.

To propose a piece, please submit an indicative abstract of up to 300 words and a brief bio of 100 words to l.rose@surrey.ac.uk and l.wenman-james@surrey.ac.uk by 1 March 2023.

Guidelines for Submission →

Guest Editors

Dr Lucy Ella Rose is is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Surrey. She works on women in nineteenth-century creative partnerships, and is currently focused on sisterhood at the fin de siècle. Rose presents and publishes on Victorian literature, visual culture and feminisms. She is the author of Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image (Edinburgh University Press 2018).

Louise Wenman-James is a PhD Candidate in English Literature at the University of Surrey. Her current recent project looks at how women’s writing at the fin de siècle engaged with ideas of decadence and aestheticism. Using the periodical press as a starting point, her research aims to uncover texts that are yet to receive critical attention in these fields. She is funded by the University of Surrey Doctoral College Studentship Award.