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Copyright

Evanghelia Stead

Published On

2024-10-11

Page Range

pp. 13–56

Language

  • English

Print Length

44 pages

1. Grotesque Vignettes and the “All Margin” Book

Chapter of: Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley(pp. 13–56)
Chapter 1, Grotesque Vignettes and the Book “All Margin,” showcases the vignettes decking three tiny volumes of witticisms known as Bon-Mots, which Beardsley illustrated in 1893–94 on the side of his major commission for Le Morte Darthur. The chapter argues that the foundational spirit of such an early grotesque nucleus in the artist’s work has been unduly neglected and discusses its meaning, uses and origins. It flags up the grotesque vignettes, set in a variety of paradoxes and plays on words, as a crucible of themes and graphic styles. They free Beardsley from influences, supply him with flexible penmanship, and stimulate new relations of art with language. The chapter shows how Beardsley treats closely contemporaneous artworks (Pre-Raphaelites, Whistler, Redon) with subversive brio; how he remodels the earlier grotesque tradition beyond recognition; how he relates calligraphic grotesques to adjacent quips and stresses the relation between grotesque vignettes and bodies. Marginal creation becomes central in fin-de-siècle print culture with Beardsley contributing to wry illustration and down-to-earth use of language. The paradigm spreads to the illustrated press. It bridges print categories, bringing bibelot refined booklets alongside periodicals, and inventively illustrates the witty idea of a book “all margin.”

Contributors

Evanghelia Stead

(author)
Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5737-7947

Linguist, literary translator and honorary Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, Evanghelia Stead is Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ Paris-Saclay). In 2023 she brought the TIGRE seminar on literature, visual and print culture to UVSQ, which she had been running in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (Department of the Arts) since 2004. She has been honoured internationally with visiting professorships at Marburg and Verona Universities, and won numerous sponsored research fellowships (CNRS, EURIAS/FRIAS, IUF, Beinecke). She has published extensively on fin-de-siècle culture, periodicals, history of the book, literature and iconography, Greek and Latin myths in modern literature, and the literary tradition of ‘the Thousand and Second Night.’ A well-known specialist on fin-de-siècle art and culture, she has also developed methodologies for periodical studies, expertise on reading books as cultural objects, reading with images, and through literature-related visual art.