Hubert Crackanthorpe: Selected Writings

This fully annotated, critical edition comprises the most extensive collection to date of Hubert Crackanthorpe's writings. As well as uncollected stories, the volume includes a short story never previously published in book form. This edition alo contains a selection of Crackanthorpe's critical writings and a bibliographical survey of his works. Crakanthorpe (1870-1896) was a critically significant contribution to the evolution of the modernist short story in Britain. His unexplained death in Paris at the age of twenty-six cut short a highly promising literary career. His collections of short stories -- the strikingly realist "Wreckage", the psychologically complex "Sentimental Studies", and the posthumous "Last Studies" -- together with the prose poems of "Vignettes", were much admired by Henry James and his contemporaries, Dowson, Johnson, and Symons, as the works of a leading, innovative writer of critical Decadence. Indeed his stories combine an unrelenting realism with a conscious aestheticizing of their often troubling, bleak subject matter. As co-editor of the short-lived periodical, "The Albemarle" and campaigning literary journalist, Crackanthorpe was a key critical participant in central literary and artistic debates of the early 1890s: 'facts' versus 'effects' in literature; the efficacy of realism/ naturalism; question of taste, 'reticence' and the handling of controversial subject matter. This is the seventh volume of the 'Jewelled Tortoise', an MHRA series of critical editions of significant Aesthetic and Decadent Texts, under the general editorship of Stefano Evangelista and Catherine Maxwell.