Full Description
The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century.
This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp's radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D'Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women's writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Joseph Bristow
Part One: New Women, Female Aesthetes, and the Emergence of Decadence
1. Impressionistic Photography and the flâneuse in Amy Levy's Romance of a Shop
S. Brooke Cameron
2. The Decay of Marriage in Ella D'Arcy's Decadent New Woman Fiction
Kate Krueger
3. Mabel Dearmer's Decadent Way
Diana Maltz
Part Two: Femininity, Masculinity, and Fin-de-Siècle Aesthetics
4. "So much too little": Alice Meynell, Walter Pater, and the Question of Influence
Beth Newman
5. Richard Le Gallienne and the Rhymers: Masculine Minority in the 1890s
Emily Harrington
6. Max Beerbohm's "Improved" Intentions by Oscar Wilde: The Aesthetics of Cosmesis
Megan Becker
Part Three: Women, Babies, Moons - 1890s Poetics
7. Dollie Radford and the Case of the Disappearing Babies
Julie Wise
8. "She hath no air": Mary Coleridge's Moon
Kasey Bass
Part Four: Aestheticism, Decadence, and the Modern Age
9. Radical Empathy in Dora Sigerson's Fairy Changeling and Broadside Poems of 1916-17
So Young Park
10. The Boom in Yellow: The Afterlife of the 1890s
Kristin Mahoney
Contributors
Index
