"This book analyzes a wide range of Beardsley's most characteristic work. It establishes his assumptions about the underlying nature of his world, and clarifies why so many observers have considered Beardsley's art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siècle Victorian culture. Beardsley's pictures present a dialogue between seemingly polarized impulses: a desire to scandalize and destabilize the old order, and, equally strong, a need to affirm traditional authority.
Beardsley depicted various grotesque shapes, caricatures, and mutated figures, including foetus/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, and dandy (the icon of the Decadent ""Religion of Art""). Incarnating the fearful contradictions of decadence, these images served as objective correlatives of some ""monstrous"" metaphysical contortion. His grotesques suggest the impossibility of resolving these contradictions, even as his elegant designs try formalistically to control and recuperate the disfiguration.
As a canonical style, Beardsley's ""dandy"" sensibility and grotesque caricatures become his means of realigning canonical meaning. Thus, he effects what might be termed a ""caricature"" of traditional signification. An aesthete devoted to the ""Religion of Art"", Beardsley, nonetheless, creates a world inescapably ""de-formed"". He is a Dandy of the Grotesque."
By:
Chris Snodgrass (Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English University of Florida) Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc Country of Publication: United States Dimensions:
Height: 245mm,
Width: 175mm,
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 875g ISBN:9780195090628 ISBN 10: 0195090624 Pages: 368 Publication Date:15 June 1995 Audience:
College/higher education
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Professional and scholarly
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Professional & Vocational
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A / AS level
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Further / Higher Education
Format:Hardback Publisher's Status: Active
Reviews for Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque
...densely packed and theoretically sophisticated study of Beardsley. * London Review of Books *