Extraordinary Aesthetes : : Decadents, New Women, and Fin-de-Siècle Culture / / ed. by Joseph Bristow.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• MitwirkendeR: Bass, Kasey,; Becker-Leckrone, Megan,; Bristow, Joseph,; Brooke Cameron, S.,
• HerausgeberIn: Bristow, Joseph,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series ; 32
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (394 p.) :; 48 colour illustrations, 4 b&w illustrations

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART I. NEW WOMEN, FEMALE AESTHETES, AND THE EMERGENCE OF DECADENCE -- Chapter one. Impressionistic Photography and the Flâneuse in Amy Levy’s The Romance of a Shop -- Chapter two. The Decay of Marriage in Ella D’Arcy’s Decadent New Woman Fiction -- Chapter three. Mabel Dearmer’s Decadent Way -- PART II. FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, AND FIN-DE-SIÈCLE AESTHETICS -- Chapter four. “So much too little”: Alice Meynell, Walter Pater, and the Question of Influence -- Chapter five. Richard Le Gallienne and the Rhymers: Masculine Minority in the 1890s -- Chapter six. Max Beerbohm’s “Improved” Intentions and the Aesthetics of Cosmesis -- PART III. WOMEN, BABIES, MOONS – 1890S POETICS -- Chapter seven. Dollie Radford and the Case of the Disappearing Babies -- Chapter eight. “She hath no air”: Mary Coleridge’s Moon -- PART IV. AESTHETICISM, DECADENCE, AND THE MODERN AGE -- Chapter nine. Radical Empathy in Dora Sigerson’s The Fairy Changeling (1898) and Broadside Poems of 1916–1917 -- Chapter ten. The Boom in Yellow: The Afterlife of the 1890s KRIS -- Contributors -- Index -- THE UCLA CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY SERIES