Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (Cultural Frames, Framing Culture)

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s __The Picture of Dorian Gray__, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siècle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde’s decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism’s negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, __Dandyism__ reveals the Victorian dandy’s legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature. The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and Proust's 'Recherche', reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precendents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller.0As defined in the period between the fin de siecle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors such as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde's decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism's negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy.0Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, 'Dandyism' reveals the Victorian dandy's legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Dandy in Long Modernism Part I: Macho Dandies 1. Fine and Dandy: Ernest Hemingway’s Androgynous Connoisseurship 2. Raymond Chandler’s Dandified Dick Part II: Decadent Dandies 3. William S. Burroughs’s Modernist Genre Decadence 4. Djuna Barnes’s Cross-Gendered Conceits Part III: Extremes and End-Times 5. The Psychopathic Dandy: A Survey Coda: The Dandy and the Hipster after the Apocalypse Notes Bibliography Index Recent Books in the Series "This work traces the aesthetic of Victorian "dandies" from works such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray through the work of later twentieth-century American and British authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, William S. Burroughs, and Djuna Barnes, as well as in postmodern thrillers, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature"-- Provided by publisher Establishing the “dandy” as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precendents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller.