Terry L. Meyers, ’67
The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod,
Incorporating Two Lost Works, Ariadne in Naxos and "Beatrice." Hardcover,
126 pages; Peter Lang Publishers, Inc, September 1996.
Terry Meyers is professor of English at the College of William and Mary.
Publisher's note: By the time he died in 1905, the Scottish writer William Sharp had succeeded as critic, biographer, poet, and novelist. Writing secretly, he also achieved fame as Fiona Macleod, a poet singled out by Yeats for her role in the Celtic revival. Two important lost works bearing on Sharp's creation of Fiona Macleod are printed here for the first time: Ariadne in Naxos, a tragedy inspired in part by Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and "Beatrice," an idyllic poem. The author introduces both works in the context of Sharp's life, showing how they highlight the sexual uncertainties Sharp felt as he contemplated marriage and how they foreshadow the birth of Fiona Macleod during the 1890s, the period when Sharp himself suffers a sexual identity crisis. Meyers uses gay and gender studies to examine Sharp's place in the late Victorian crucible for modern constructions of sexual roles.
Uncollected Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Terry L. Meyers, ed. Hardcover, Pickering & Chatto Publishers, November 2004.
Professor Meyers has published extensively on Swinburne (1837-1909) and contributed
the Swinburne entry to The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.
Publisher's note: This three-volume collection
adds more than 550 letters to the canon that were not available when Cecil
Y Lang
published his collection of Swinburne letters in the late 1950s and early
1960s. This new collection includes hundreds of unpublished letters addressed
to Swinburne,
as well as providing a number of accounts and descriptions of Swinburne either
previously unknown or fallen from scholarly knowledge. In addition to the
full texts of the letters and thorough annotations, the edition includes
a major
appendix updating Lang’s earlier work – identifying
where holographs then missing are now housed (and correcting the printed texts
from the originals), identifying correspondents and allusions then uncertain
or unknown, and correcting or narrowing mistaken or unknown dates.
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