Aestheticism And Sexual Parody 1840 1940

This original and provocative 2001 study discusses the work of a number of authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to argue that mainstream society was enabled to accept the non-normative sexuality of the Aesthetic Movement chiefly through parody and self-parody. Highlighting Victorian popular culture, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds an important dimension to the theorisations of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics.

A must-read for scholars of visuality, gender and sexuality. Denisoff's study explores the ways in which gothic, sensation and noir literature and cinema manipulated common notions of the visual in order to challenge sex- and gender-based assumptions that marginalized certain people and desires. Addressing authors and directors such as Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Virigina Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang, this study shows that what a society gets is often what it tries hardest not to see.

This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries, including such celebrated writers as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker.

Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It argues that parody is central to the whole modernist project, even to supposedly earnest movements such as Imagism, and not just to the extreme avant-garde antics of Dada. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, define themselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing. It offered a ready method to laugh at folly, amuse friends, criticize opponents, spike enemies, and transgress conventions. Being double-coded, parody proved a powerful weapon in the culture wars, enabling modernists to present and simultaneously challenge prevailing ideologies in all their historically determined complexity. Its fundamentally dialogic and palimpsestual form exposed the limitations of naïve mimesis, insisting that literature is always language in unstable play, while simultaneously foregrounding the relational structures that underwrote the modernists' paradoxical claims to originality and modernity. As a principle of continual genesis-and a spur to the production of yet more forcefully experimental art-parody therefore became the modernists' primary reflex as they negotiated their position in literary culture and made it new.

Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.

Atlantic Republic traces the legacy of the United States both as a place and as an idea in the work of English writers from 1776 to the present day. Seeing the disputes of the Reformation as a precursor to this transatlantic divide, it argues that America has operated since the Revolution as a focal point for various traditions of dissent within English culture. By ranging over writers from Richard Price and Susanna Rowson in the 1790s to Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie at the turn of the twenty-first century, the book argues that America haunts the English literary tradition as a parallel space where ideology and aesthetics are configured differently. Consequently, it suggests, many of the key episodes in British history-parliamentary reform in the 1830s, the imperial designs of the Victorian era, the twentieth-century conflict with fascism, the advance of globalization since 1980-have been shaped by implicit dialogues with American cultural models. Rather than simply reinforcing the benign myth of a 'special relationship', Paul Giles considers how various English writers over the past 200 years have engaged with America for various complicated reasons: its promise of political republicanism (Byron, Mary Shelley); its emphasis on religious disestablishment (Clough, Gissing); its prospect of pastoral regeneration (Ruxton, Lawrence); its vision of scientific futurism (Huxley, Ballard). The book also analyses the complex cultural relations between Britain and the United States around the time of the Second World War, suggesting that writers such as Wodehouse, Isherwood, and Auden understood the United States and Germany to offer alternative versions of the kind of technological modernity that appeared equally hostile to traditional forms of English culture. The book ends with a consideration of ways in which the canon of English literature might appear in a different light if seen from a transnational rather than a familiar national perspective.

What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of ‘needs’ to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet. The collection builds on recent critical developments in fin-de-siècle literature (including major interventions in the areas of Decadence, sexuality, and gender studies) and asks, for instance, how did late nineteenth-century writing schematise the libidinal and somatic dimensions of economic exchange? How might we define the relationship between eroticism and the formal economies of literary production/performance? And what relation exists between advertising/consumer culture and (dissident) sexuality in fin-de-siecle literary discourses? This book marks an important contribution to 19th-Century and Victorian literary studies, and enhances the field of fin-de-siècle studies more generally.