Ernest Dowson: Collected Shorter Fiction

Ernest Christopher Dowson (1867-1900) is best known as a the author of a number of exquisite lyrics which epitomise the mood and style of the English 1890s - verses like 'cynara' and 'They are not long'. Yet Arthur Symons was only repeating what Dowson often himself asserted when he said that 'Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared more for his prose than his verse'.

Monica Borg's Introduction suggests for the first time what lay behind Dowson's opinion of the importance of his prose, seeing withing it a programme of aesthetic and cultural radicalism. She places him firmly in relation to the late-nineteenth-century crisis of values, self and representation which Dowson both expressed and sought to precipitate, and she indicates that it is in his stories rather than his verse that Dowson shows how deeply implicated he was in the politics of resistance and cultural change that characterized the decadent literary and artistic movement.

This edition provides texts of all of Dowson's short stories, thoroughly corrected from the original editions and with detailed notes on their genesis and development.