Arthur Symons’s (1865–1945) prominence at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequent influence on early-twentieth-century literature is well established. His biographer Karl Beckson aptly calls him “a major figure who helped stimulate the Modernist initiative.”

The breadth of his artistic interests and critical commentary remains extraordinary. In addition to writing short stories, poems, plays, travel sketches, and translations, Symons was a prolific critic and editor who wrote about literature and what he termed “the seven arts.” Yeats famously offered him the laurel “best critic of his generation.” Symons championed freedom of subject matter and literary style and thus influenced the work of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and others, particularly in introducing them to the evocative work of French symbolist writers.

Arthur Symons, Critic Among Critics: An Annotated Bibliography documents the scholarly attention Symons continues to receive not only for his critical influence, but for his own creative work. This annotated bibliography captures over 1000 articles, books, reviews, dissertations, and other writings about Symons, revising and updating Carol Simpson Stern’s 1974 bibliography published in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. Over 700 new items appear, some of these from unsigned articles now identified as written by authors such as Virginia Woolf and John Middleton Murry.

The book, arranged alphabetically by author with annotations in paraphrase style, includes a helpful index and provides a chronological list of works published from the1880s to 2005 that will prove useful in tracing the evolution of criticism about Symons. Arthur Symons, Critic Among Critics joins ELT Press’s Arthur Symons: A Bibliography (1990), which covers the primary works, to give scholars a comprehensive view of his writings.

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Although the Victorian era closed, literally, with the death of the Queen in January 1901, the post-Victorian transition had begun decades earlier. Farewell, Victoria! presents Stanley Weintraub’s engaging perspectives on late-Victorian literature, primarily but not exclusively its fiction, which looked backward to popular antecedents and forward to the societal and technological future.

The early 1880s saw the close of iconic Victorian literary careers—Disraeli, Rossetti, Eliot, Meredith, and Trollope among others. It was also the decade of new reputations that would continue in some cases into the middle of the next century. The 1890s witnessed a plethora of experiments in modernity. The Yellow Book and The Savoy, graphic realism and a redefinition of morals, futuristic prophecy and exotic fantasy would expand taste, enlarge the market for books, and write a finis to leftovers from the past.

Stanley Weintraub (Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware) offers more than a dozen critiques of the literature of these two decades, essays from many years collected, revised, and updated in this important addition to the 1880–1920 British Authors series. He is one of the most well-known and respected scholars in the field, author or editor of more than fifty books, many dealing with the Victorians and early moderns, including biographies of Victoria, Albert, Disraeli, Whistler, Shaw, and the Rossettis.