{"id":177,"date":"2021-10-26T11:23:45","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T15:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/?page_id=177"},"modified":"2026-03-19T09:03:05","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T13:03:05","slug":"dandy-of-the-grotesque","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/dandy-of-the-grotesque\/","title":{"rendered":"Dandy of the Grotesque"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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Dandy of the Grotesque<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

(Oxford University Press, 1995)
\nSelected by CHOICE as one of the \u201c outstanding academic books of 1995\u201d<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Brief Excerpts from Reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat this perceptive volume attempts primarily is an examination of the details of Beardsley\u2019s works and, within the personal and historical contexts of Beardsley\u2019s life, an extrapolation of the thematic structures that inform those works.\u00a0 Specifically, Snodgrass deals with the larger pattern that underlies the various styles and tropes of Beardsley\u2019s drawings.\u00a0 Six tightly reasoned chapters, well illustrated with reproductions of Beardsley\u2019s works, delve into the \u201cvisions\u201d in his oeuvre and then situate their formulations within a spirited framework.\u00a0 In fine, this comprehensive examination resolves many of the questions and paradoxes that surround the \u201cDandy of the Grotesque\u201d and should become the standard work on Beardsley for years to come.\u00a0 Essential for all academic collections.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014George Cevasco,\u00a0Choice<\/i>\u00a0(December 1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cI have no doubt that this book will immediately become a standard text on Beardsley and his art.\u00a0 There is nothing else as comprehensive and searching as this book and it is highly unlikely that anything like it will be needed in the future . . . . Professor Snodgrass does an excellent job of establishing the context in which Beardsley worked, of examining his character (without resorting to arcane psychoanalytic or psychological terminology), and most importantly of explaining the nature of his art.\u00a0 This book offers many exciting and convincing close readings of Beardsley\u2019s drawings and provides as well an intellectually satisfying Beardsley iconography.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014John R. Reed, Wayne State University (1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor Beardsley scholars in particular I believe Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque is the most important book since Stanley Weintraub\u2019s Beardsley biography in 1967.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Robert Langenfeld, UNC-Greensboro and Editor of\u00a0ELT<\/i>\u00a0(1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cChris Snodgrass\u2019s new book (its subtitle is unfortunately restrictive) seems . . . the most valuable analysis of [Beardsley\u2019s] extravagance and complexity to date. . . . What makes Snodgrass\u2019s study particularly worthwhile is the remarkable precision of his descriptive language, and the placement of his hundred-plus illustrations of Beardsley\u2019s work, most of them sharply reproduced, helpfully close to the words about them. . . . It will be an essential resource for those interested in that remarkable artist who was far more than a \u2018dandy of the grotesque.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Stanley Weintraub,\u00a0ELT<\/i>\u00a039.4 (1996)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is one of the merits of Chris Snodgrass\u2019s book that he ignores neither the religious nor the biographical dimension of Beardsley\u2019s art. . . . Through brilliantly sensitive readings of a large number of images of the grotesque and the dandy . . . he argues that Beardsley\u2019s work creates a sense of total indeterminacy, not simply a tension playing back and forth between fixed poles, because it \u2018is not a world stable enough to produce fixed poles\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Gerald N. Izenberg,\u00a0Victorian Studies<\/i>\u00a0(Spring 1997)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cBuilding upon many other scholars\u2019 \u2018readings\u2019 of Beardsley\u2019s illustrations and exhaustive of contemporaneous material, Snodgrass adds to them fascinating detail as he carefully illumines the way Beardsley\u2019s drawings undercut any final, or \u2018univocal,\u2019 interpretation. . . . It is the bewildering quality of the drawings, their structure, that Chris Snodgrass has set himself to explore, and he does so carefully and successfully.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Linda Zatlin,\u00a0SAR<\/i>\u00a061.1 (Winter 1996) and\u00a0Criticism<\/i>\u00a038.3 (Summer 1996)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201c[Snodgrass’s] . . . in-depth analysis is quite fascinating, as [he] covers cultural, sexual, metaphysical, psychological, and artistic facets of Beardsley’s sly and contradictory world.\u00a0 [Beardsley’s] grotesque figures were meant to be disorienting and shocking, corrupt and satiric, and Snodgrass explains why, both in terms of Beardsley himself and in terms of his milieu.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Donna Seaman,\u00a0Booklist<\/i>\u00a0(May 15, 1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was struck once again by how well Snodgrass writes, and how clearly he thinks. . . . In this book, he brings to the visual images an attention that is a model of critical inquiry, balancing the interpretive and evaluative responsibilities of a critic with a practised and principled hand. . . . It is a fine and formidable book.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014J.\u00a0 Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto (1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe chapters of the grotesque, perhaps because the grotesque subsumes the very dichotomies it images, I found extraordinarily rich. . . . The concluding chapter, on the rhetoric of parody, is also a delight . . . . Much is asked of scholars these days: awareness of a critical tradition regarding any body of work, an in-depth understanding of the work\u2019s cultural context, and apt appropriation of a wide spectrum of relevant theory\u2014all as background for a focused yet complex and original commentary of \u2018texts,\u2019 in the broad sense of that term.\u00a0 Professor Snodgrass, in achieving that synthesis, has created one excellent book and laid the groundwork for a number of others.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Stanford University (1995)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Aubrey Beardsley, often cited as the \u201cdominating artistic personality\u201d and \u201cthe one \u2018genius\u2019\u201d of the 1890s, has long been acknowledged by scholars as \u201cthe mentality most representative\u201d of the period known as the Victorian Decadence.\u00a0\u00a0Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque<\/i>\u00a0analyzes a wide range of Beardsley\u2019s most characteristic works, establishing the assumptions underlying his world view and clarifying why so many observers have considered Beardsley\u2019s art indispensable to understanding\u00a0fin-de-si\u00e8cle<\/i>\u00a0Victorian culture.\u00a0 The book examines Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic development and his implicit view of the nature of meaning itself in the context of the\u00a0fin de si\u00e8cle<\/i>.\u00a0 His parodic art, characterized by a variety of grotesque figures and revolutionary designs, captured visually the central contradictions and paradoxes of the \u201cyellow nineties\u201d\u2014a period whose \u201cReligion of Art\u201d sought to establish an authenticating \u201ccenter\u201d for life, only to discover a world that was not logocentric and comforting, but paradoxical and unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Beardsley\u2019s art presents an ultimately unresolved, interlacing dialogue between two seemingly polar impulses, variations of the same polarity that characterized his personal temperament: on the one hand, an almost compulsive desire to violate, scandalize, and destabilize conventional boundaries of decorum, imposing an iconoclastic personal \u201csignature\u201d on the old order; and on the other hand , an equally strong need to incorporate, inscribe, and affirm the metaphysical certainty of traditional authority, whether it be some implicit moral integrity (in opposition to social hypocrisy) or the absolute hegemony of Art.\u00a0 It is part of the precarious balance in Beardsley\u2019s art that neither iconoclastic disorder nor cultural authority is able to supercede the other entirely, always leaving the viewer with some degree of intractable paradox, stranded in a continuing whirlpool of irony.\u00a0 Signaling a visual-arts equivalent of Einstein\u2019s relativity theory and Heisenberg\u2019s \u201cuncertainty principle,\u201d Beardsley\u2019s salacious hidden images and ambiguous designs demand to \u201cbe read\u201d narratively and conventionally and yet ultimately resist any harmonizing univocal meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The grotesque becomes for Beardsley an emblem for\u2014the objective correlative of\u2014this potentially \u201cmonstrous\u201d metaphysical dislocation.\u00a0 As if concentrating all the fearful contradictions of the Decadence itself, Beardsley\u2019s various grotesque shapes and mutated figures\u2014foetus\/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, among others\u2014function as visual incarnations of metaphysical contortion and suggest the ultimate impossibility of ever resolving the paradoxes such dislocations represent, even as Beardsley\u2019s elegant designs seek to control and implicitly recuperate those dislocations formalistically.\u00a0 Embodying a style that simultaneously \u201cdeforms\u201d yet aestheticizes, Beardsley\u2019s grotesque reconfigurations become a rhetoric for radically realigning canonical meaning itself, effecting a kind of \u201ccaricature\u201d of traditional signification.\u00a0 And among all of Beardsley\u2019s tropic \u201cmutations,\u201d the one figure which most synthesizes both the disorienting dislocations of the grotesque and the recuperating elegance of art, is the Dandy, that rebellious icon of the Decadent \u201cReligion of Art.\u201d\u00a0 Similarly, Beardsley himself, over the entirety of his short career and in a dazzling array of constantly changing styles, presents us with a world which is inescapably \u201cde-formed\u201d even in its elegance.\u00a0 As an artist and cultural icon, he was himself, in effect, a Dandy of the Grotesque.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter-by-Chapter Synopsis<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 1<\/i>\u00a0 Aubrey Beardsley: Emblem of the Victorian Decadence<\/span>
\n(introduction; see abstract)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 2<\/i>\u00a0 The Urge to Outrage: The Rhetoric of Scandal<\/span>
\nExamines Beardsley\u2019s desire to violate and destabilize conventional boundaries of decorum and how this iconoclastic \u201curge to outrage\u201d functioned as a rhetorical imperative in his art, imposing a distinctive, personal \u201csignature\u201d on the ruling canonical order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 3<\/i>\u00a0 The Craving for Authority: Rescue and Redemption<\/span>
\nInvestigates the \u201copposite pole\u201d of the Beardsleyan \u201cdialectic,\u201d Beardsley\u2019s equally strong and often simultaneously demonstrated need to affirm and incorporate traditional authority\u2014reflected in his debt to countless cultural father-figures and his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church; his ritualistic work habits and his attempts to impose order artistically through the symmetrical variations and hard, powerful lines of his designs; and his ultimate allegiance to the hegemony of Art itself, a belief in the redemptive power of artistic order.\u00a0 The chapter shows how Beardsley\u2019s ostensibly iconoclastic deviance often proved to be an ironically conservative strategy, oddly fortifying the foundations of the very Victorian mores it critiqued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 4<\/i>\u00a0 The Rhetoric of the Grotesque: Monsters as Emblems<\/span>
\nAnalyzes how the grotesque, extending the basic paradox of Beardsley\u2019s art, became for Beardsley an emblem for life\u2019s potentially \u201cmonstrous\u201d metaphysical dislocations.\u00a0 It was, in effect, his metaphor or figurative expression for the inexorable and unresolvable personal and metaphysical paradoxes revealed in Chapters 2 and 3, conflating violently, and inevitably throwing into question, a multitude of apparent oppositions\u2014male\/female, culture\/nature, ethereal\/animal, sacred\/profane, good\/evil, victimizer\/victim, freedom\/imprisonment, unity\/estrangement, et cetera.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 5<\/i>\u00a0 The Beardsleyan Dandy: Icon of Paradox<\/span>
\nDemonstrates how the figure of the dandy orchestrated for Beardsley both the scandalizing disorientations of the grotesque and the recuperating elegance and control of art, incarnating Beardsley\u2019s paradoxical iconoclastic authoritarianism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Chapter 6<\/i>\u00a0 The Rhetoric of Parody: Signing and Resigning the Canon<\/span>
\nPulls together the various parallel planes\u2014both personal and figurative\u2014of the previous chapters to show how Beardsley’s \u201cdandiacal\u201d sensibility employed the grotesque not only figuratively but rhetorically.\u00a0 Utilizing the grotesque in the service of parody, Beardsley radically realigned canonical meaning, creating a style of canonical \u201cdeformation\u201d and recuperation\u2014in effect, a \u201ccaricature of signification.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\r\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1075,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"featured_post":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-177","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1075"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":940,"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/177\/revisions\/940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.clas.ufl.edu\/snod\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}