Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was every 5′3 ½″ a lady, but she outdrank men from Montgomery to Manhattan to Marseilles. Her short stories were so good that, sometimes, they appeared under her husband Scott's name. She was a gifted painter whose work was mostly bought out of pity, lost forever because it was unsigned and often given away, and burned by a protective, possibly jealous sister. She was a gifted dancer who began in earnest too late and never got a real chance. She was an early feminist heroine. She has inspired classic fantasy-action video games, lines of clothing, agenda-driven biographies, and novels from the beautiful to the damnable. She is catnip to movies and television series and is the current subject of two major biopics, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson. The legends of Zelda go on and on, from shortly after her birth in 1900 to the present day, and surely beyond. Yet the truths of Zelda, as we can find them, are much finer and more meaningful than all the legends they still beget. It is time to realize how much they can round out, and also increase, the legend.

Victorian sexual norms, though organized around reproductive marriage, were by no means limited to that practice. The Introduction argues that it was common in the period to consider sexual restraint – whether lifelong or temporary – to be productive of health, wellbeing, and energy that could be given to non-sexual endeavours such as religious feeling or art. This idea was found in diverse contexts, underpinned by various models of bodily function, and across the political spectrum. The Introduction outlines the place this productive continence held in an alternative Decadent tradition to that usually explored by Decadent Studies. Far from being incompatible with the embodied pleasure that was so important to Decadent aesthetics, restraint was repeatedly imagined to facilitate such experience, and to answer to the anxieties that many writers associated with the supposed ugliness, degeneration, over-crowding, and haste of the modern world. The Introduction outlines the methodological challenges of its subject and the book’s relationship with other theoretical approaches to sexuality in literature, such as Psychoanalysis, Queer Studies, Gender Studies, and the History of Ideas.

What is it to forget a concept, confuse one, or lose one? These are familiar terms of criticism for Kierkegaard, but they can seem strangely otiose or themselves confused. In his essay, Cavell elucidates these terms, their critical purport in Kierkegaard’s practice, and he seeks to offer an assessment of that practice – in particular, to assess whether the practice is itself philosophical. Cavell’s assessment leads him to discuss (early in the essay) the connection between the religious and the psychological and (late) the connection between the aesthetic and the psychological. Jolley reassesses Cavell’s assessment: he refocuses on the forgetting, confusing, or losing of concepts, and on the use of such terms of criticism – in Kierkegaard’s specifically, but also more generally in many philosophical practices that understand themselves as at once logical and dialectical. E.g., What is the difference, for Kierkegaard, between qualitative dialectic and quantitative? Is the making of such a distinction an application, a moment, of one or the other dialectic, and if so, what are the consequences of such self-application? Along the way, Jolley revisits Cavell’s understanding of the connection between the religious and the psychological, and the aesthetic and the psychological.

Like the panoramas, sets of lithographs based on officers’ drawings created new versions of the Arctic imaginary. Such products were too expensive to appeal to the average consumer, but printsellers’ practice of displaying lithographs in their windows and holding exhibitions ensured that this particular version of the Arctic reached far more people than simply those who could afford to purchase them. This chapter observes how the Arctic and the search were represented in three folios of lithographs produced from officers’ sketches (Browne, 1850; Cresswell, 1854; May, 1855). With attention to text and picture, using sketches and written sources, I offer close readings of these materials. This chapter emphasises how the lithographs, from 1850 to 1855, increasingly imply that a battle is being waged against the capricious Arctic nature in an effort to find Franklin. Significantly, the ability of these apparently factual lithographs to continually evolve and multiply, both digitally and on paper, ensures that they continue to inform ways of thinking about the nineteenth-century Arctic, and perhaps the present-day Arctic, into the future.

Also Schelling – by 1802 a declared Spinozist – altered his methodology, adding to it a phenomenological dimension. In 1807 he portrayed the philosopher as an artist singularly gifted with an intuitive sense for nature as issuing from the Oneness of the Absolute, equally substance and subject. Jacobi attacked him for this. Chapter 4 details Schelling’s ensuing controversy with him but is otherwise dedicated to Schelling’s seminal Freedom Essay (1809). In the essay Schelling again portrayed the philosopher as a divinely inspired artist. He now conceived his work, however, as one of remembering the event at which God manifests himself in the form of a world that reflects in its manifold the internal economy of the divine being. This event is shrouded in the human unconscious but can be brought to light through the philosopher’s imaginative representations. The warrant for these is that they resonate with humankind’s belief, embodied in mythology, that its history is also the history of God’s realization in space/time. Schelling was thus adopting a rich metaphysical position, the direct contrary of Fichte’s ontological quietism, which the monism the two shared nonetheless also made possible. Evil comes up as an important issue for Schelling

Starting with Pompeo Batoniߣs bravura portrait of The Honourable Colonel William Gordon, 1766 (Fyvie Castle), this chapter considers painted portraiture as a vehicle through which educated, socially privileged young Scotsmen like Colonel Gordon, the 8th Duke of Hamilton and James Boswell fashioned their identity while on the grand tour in Europe. Drawing on the published and unpublished accounts of travelling Scots, including Dr John Moore, the Duke of Hamiltonߣs tutor, grand tour portraits by artists including Pompeo Batoni and Nathaniel Dance are considered as potent means for representing, disseminating and reproducing familial and homosocial relations. In much the same way that the grand tour was seen as a means for transcending geographical barriers and cultural stereotypes, so we will see how Scots in Italy are imaged first and foremost as inclusively British, rather than exclusively Scottish, while engaged in this social and geographical rite of passage across cosmopolitan Europe.