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. As 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. 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.
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