Aubrey Beardsley And Victorian Sexual Politics

In the first serious examination of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, poetry, and unfinished erotic novel, this book looks beyond dismissals of Beardsley's work, and offers a stimulating reconsideration of his artistic perspective. By examining Beardsley's work within the social, artistic, and literary context of the 1890's, Zatlin demonstrates that behind the choice of his subject matter there was more than simply a desire for sexual exploration: there was also a serious protest against hypocrisy and against the sexist social conventions that fostered that hypocrisy. She explores the various types of women revealed in his art, and argues convincingly that gender relations were Beardsley's overwhelming concern, and that his main achievement emerged as an erotic art which challenged public sexual morality.

Sutton presents a study of the influence of Richard Wagner on the work of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). She explores the role of Wagnerism within British culture of the 1890's, in particular the relations between Wagnerism and the decadent movement.

The Art of Aubrey Beardsley is a study about English artist and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, written by British editor and critic Arthur Symons. The book includes biographical essay and numerous illustrations by the artist. Beardsley's drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler.

The original essays in this collection chronicle the transformation of Arnold Schoenberg's works from music as pure art to music as a vehicle of religious and political ideas, during the first half of the twentieth century. This interdisciplinary volume includes contributions from musicologists, music theorists, and scholars of German literature and of Jewish studies.

This book documents how Oscar Wilde was appropriated as a fictional character by no less than thirty-two of his contemporaries, including such celebrated writers as Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker.

Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1950s, German writer and artist Unica Zürn produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material within psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. While Zürn is often discussed in relation to her partner, the controversial artist Hans Bellmer, this innovative book moves beyond the familiar model of the overlooked 'significant other' and re-introduces her as a member of the French Surrealist group. This is the first monograph on the life and work of the Unica Zürn in English. Esra Plumer presents Zürn's life and work in light of the artist's individual experiences with WWII, Post-war Surrealism and mental illness, at the same time revealing wider aspects of her artistic practice in relation to her contemporaries. She also reveals how the techniques of anagrams and automatism (writing and drawing methods designed to unlock the subconscious mind) form the pillars of Zürn's artistic creative output, which carry her work into the wider theoretical circles of psychoanalytic theory and post-structuralist thought.

First published in 1997, and written by leading scholars of the day , these fifteen essays examine aspects of the reception and collecting of Pre-Raphaelite Art, the social and cultural context in which the work was favoured and acquired. Two major collections provide the focus for the investigation: that of the Birmingham city Museums and Art Gallery in the United Kingdom, and that of the American Samuel Bancroft Jr, now part of the Delaware Art Museum. The study of these two collections both formed in the late 1890’, places Pre-Raphaelite Art at nexus of contemporary cultural issues that touched the lives of both the city council, intent on establishing a public gallery of national importance, and a wealthy American businessman, indulging a private passion for the work of these artists. The contributors approach the issue in a variety of ways, These include the study of the ambitions and self-perception of collectors of the period, an analysis of the impact of John Ruskin’s campaign to establish Pre-Raphaelite painting as the ‘Art of England’ , and its impact on notions of civic and national identity ; the examination of individual painting in relation to such issues as the portrayal of women, the nude and of religious subjects ; and the study of the Victorian preoccupation with Renaissance Italy and the attempt by Ruskin, Charles Fairfax Murray , advisor to the two collections, and the Grosvenor Gallery, to proclaim the Pre-Raphaelite artists as the true inheritors of the ‘genius’ of Renaissance Italian artists.These essays were first presented at a symposium held at the Delaware Art Museum during the exhibition there of the paintings of Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery.

Federico Fellini professed a desire to create “an entire film made of immobile pictures.” In this study, Hava Aldouby uses this quotation as a launching point to analyze Fellini’s films as sequences of “pictures” that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir of visual imagery. Aldouby employs an innovative pictorial approach that allows her to uncover a wealth of visual evocations overlooked by Fellini scholars over the years. Federico Fellini: Painting in Film, Painting on Film sheds light on the intertextual links between Fellini’s films and the works of various artists, from Velazquez to Francis Bacon, by identifying references to specific paintings in his films. Using new archival evidence from Fellini’s private library, brought to light for the first time here, Aldouby draws out Fellini’s in-depth knowledge of art history and his systematic employment of art-historical allusions.

From 1880 to 1956, when John Osborne transformed the British theater world with Look Back in Anger, British playwrights made numerous lasting contributions and provided a foundation for the innovations of dramatists during the latter half of the 20th century. This reference profiles the life and work of some 40 British playwrights active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom are also known for their work as novelists and poets. Included are figures such as W. H. Auden, Max Beerbohm, Noel Coward, T. S. Eliot, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, George Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. Each entry provides a biographical overview; a list of major plays and summaries of their critical reception; a list of minor plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career; and archival and bibliographical information. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for some 40 British playwrights active from 1880 through 1956. Entries are written by expert contributors, with each entry providing a biographical overview; a list of major plays, premieres, and significant revivals, along with a summary of the critical reception of these works; a listing of additional plays, adaptations, and productions; an assessment of the playwright's career and contributions, with reference to published evaluations in magazines, journals, dissertations, and books; a listing of locations housing unpublished archival material, if available; a selected bibliography of the dramatist's published plays and of essays and articles by the playwright on aspects of the theater; a selected bibliography of secondary sources; and, when available, a listing of previously published bibliographies on the playwright.