Hao-Yu Hu

Navigating Decadence, the Queer Child, and Futurity in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis

This paper situates Oscar Wilde’s prison writing De Profundis as a paradigmatic example of Decadent life-writing, a proto-modernist genre fashioned by forms of lived marginality – in this case, the queer experiences of legal, social, and cultural exclusion – and the embodied temporal differences that accompany these marginalised experiences. Drawing on the theoretical framework of queer temporality developed by Jack Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, José Esteban Muñoz and others, it examines how Wilde navigates his persecuted queer identity through the imaginative reconfiguration of time. I argue that Wilde’s exploration of alternative temporalities centres on the figure of the queer child, characterised by suspended growth, sideways motion, and unruly development, as formulated by Kathryn Bond Stockton. In De Profundis, Wilde constructs and contrasts two distinct models of the queer child. The first model, informed by fin-de-siècle sexological and degeneration discourses, emerges through his representation of Alfred Douglas and recalls the figure of Dorian Gray. This model embodies a queer child whose temporal arrest and suspension of normative developments enable unbounded aesthetic self-fashioning, yet also reveals the solipsistic and potentially degenerative consequences of Decadent stasis when pursued to its extreme. The second model appears in Wilde’s aesthetic engagement with Christianity, particularly his portrayal of Christ as an artist, and resonates with his Christian-inflected fairy tales like ‘The Young King’ and ‘The Star Child’. Here, the queer child resists linear development not through temporal suspension but through the transformative experiences of suffering, death, and martyrdom – forms of sideways motions that break the solipsistic self into sympathy with others. The tension between these two models of the queer child reflects Wilde’s critical reassessment of his Decadent aesthetics; moreover, it demonstrates his wish to move beyond modes of stasis, retrogression, and arrested development frequently associated with homosexuality in sexology to envision the possibility of queer futurity.

Hao-Yu Hu is a second-year PhD student in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he is working on a thesis that examines British Decadent literature through the theoretical framework of queer temporality, with a particular focus on the works of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field. Hao-Yu holds a MA in Romantic and Victorian Literary Studies with distinction from Durham University, UK. His research interests include Decadence, Aestheticism, and Modernism, comparative and world literature, gender studies and queer theory, and literary genres including life-writing, fairy tales, and drama.

Lucinda Janson

Portrait of the invert as a child: Trans Autobiographical Fiction in Hungerheart (1915) by Christopher St John

Ever since Jay Prosser’s groundbreaking Second Skins (1998), scholars have recognised autobiography as a paradigmatically trans genre, given the vital necessity for trans people to fashion their life story into a coherent autobiographical tale, in order to access medical care or to be understood by the world around them. While Prosser’s earliest example of such autobiographical self-fashioning is Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (1928), this paper will explore trans self-fashioning, and particularly the depiction of (proto-)trans childhood, in a semi-autobiographical novel published in the second decade of the twentieth century, by English novelist Christopher St John. St John is better known for her queer life partnership with the theatre director, producer, and costume designer Edith Craig (daughter of Ellen Terry) and the painter Tony Atwood. I will explore how St John’s Hungerheart (1915) depicts its autobiographical protagonist’s childhood, concentrating particularly on the child’s strangeness and marginality. The child at the heart of the novel is at odds with its family environment, and retreats into historical and fantastical worlds in order to resist the temporal logics of developmentalism which insist on heteronormative, linear growth. I argue that such a retreat into alternative times, with different gender possibilities, can be read as the adoption of the liberatory, reparative potential of temporal ‘folding’ which contemporary trans theory has begun to recognise as ‘transitional’ or ‘trans time’ (Carter, ‘Embracing Transition’, 2013).

I will engage with contemporary reviews which read the protagonist of Hungerheart as abnormal and perverse for disobeying the conventions of girlhood, and its author as disobeying the norms of fiction by writing in an overtly autobiographical manner. I use a reading of these reviews to argue for a more nuanced approach to the interplay of fiction and autobiography in the novel, taking it seriously as a work of fiction as well as an addition to the canon of trans, modernist autobiography.

Lucinda Janson is a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London, where she is researching queer and trans childhoods in the early-twentieth-century British novel. She holds an Honours degree in English Literature from the Australian National University and an MSt in English (1830-1914) from the University of Oxford.

Ciaran Gardner

“Like a bridge-builder”: Intimacy, Infrastructure, and Transitioning in Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman (1933)

This paper examines Lili Elbe’s Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex (1933) as a modernist narrative of transgender marginalisation that mobilises infrastructure as a means of articulating gender transition, intimacy, and social belonging. healthcare and medical research (Pearce 2018), the inclusivity of social spaces (Crawford 2016), particularly gendered spaces like bathrooms (Wilson 2016), and state or legal infrastructure (Scherpe 2015), such infrastructures were emergent, unstable, or inaccessible during Elbe’s lifetime in the interwar period. Writing within the context of early twentieth-century modernity and the short-lived Institute of Sexology, Elbe relies not just on medical care but rather turns to infrastructural sites such as bridges, rivers, and trainlines and the narrative form to negotiate her movement through socially gendered space.

Drawing on Ara Wilson’s and Lauren Berlant’s work on intimacy studies and infrastructure, this paper argues that Elbe’s infrastructural imagery registers the tensions between interiority and exteriority, visibility and marginalisation, that characterise transgender embodiment in modernism. Railways and bridges, central to the circulation of people and commerce in 1930s Europe, structure Elbe’s physical movement between Copenhagen and Berlin while also enabling moments of narrative and affective transition. It is on the train that Elbe symbolically writes the obituary for her dead name and receives recognition from other women; it is on a Berlin bridge that she imagines herself as a “bridge-builder,” suspended between states of becoming; and it is the River Elbe that stabilises her sense of self.

By foregrounding infrastructure as an intimate yet disciplinary system, this paper demonstrates how Elbe’s Man into Woman challenges modernist norms of embodiment and expands understandings of how marginalised voices navigate, repurpose, and render visible the spatial and cultural infrastructures of early twentieth-century modernity.

Ciaran Gardner is a postgraduate student in English Literary Studies who received his Masters with Distinction from the University of York in 2025. His dissertation looked at a theoretical black spectral presence articulated within Toni Morrison’s non-fiction work and stage plays. He has contributed a chapter, titled “Black Flight, Black Capture: Visibility, Surveillance, and Freedom in Song of Solomon,” to the forthcoming Critical Insights: Song of Solomon scheduled to be published in early 2027 by Salem Press. His PhD thesis will consider channels of Affect within Black Atlantic literature across the 20^th Century.