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Copyright

Evanghelia Stead

Published On

2024-10-11

Page Range

pp. 107–140

Language

  • English

Print Length

34 pages

3. A Dandy’s Portico of Portraits

Chapter of: Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley(pp. 107–140)
Chapter 3, A Dandy’s Portico of Portraits, links Beardsley’s early grotesque work with his monstrous self-portraits – dandified attitudes based on aplomb, caprice, and nerve. His mischievous, progressively scandalous representations and postures taunted critics and spread rumours. His self-portraits in the Yellow Book and the Savoy, defiantly monstrous yet subtly jesting, encouraged parody and imitation, examined here through differential comparison. Deliberately placing himself at the periphery of cultural monuments (books or cathedrals), he inversed the relationship between whole and part and the ancient practice of artisans’ “signature” on minsters. The chapter sees in Frederick H. Evans’s photographs of Beardsley as a cathedral grotesque and a gargoyle a climactic expression heralding body art. The wit of this offbeat series of depictions, fantasised or ludicrous images of the self, against an explicit background of monstrosity, calls for a revision of assumptions and cultural hierarchies. Book and cathedral appear in typical fin-de-siècle form, the first swapped for ephemeral periodicals, the second a fragile minster conquered by its anomalous parts.

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.