“What this perceptive volume attempts primarily is an examination of the details of Beardsley’s works and, within the personal and historical contexts of Beardsley’s life, an extrapolation of the thematic structures that inform those works. Specifically, Snodgrass deals with the larger pattern that underlies the various styles and tropes of Beardsley’s drawings. Six tightly reasoned chapters, well illustrated with reproductions of Beardsley’s works, delve into the “visions” in his oeuvre and then situate their formulations within a spirited framework. In fine, this comprehensive examination resolves many of the questions and paradoxes that surround the Dandy of the Grotesque” and should become the standard work on Beardsley for years to come. Essential for all academic collections.” —George Cevasco, Choice (December 1995)
“I have no doubt that this book will immediately become a standard text on Beardsley and his art. 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. This book offers many exciting and convincing close readings of Beardsley’s drawings and provides as well an intellectually satisfying Beardsley iconography.” —John R. Reed, Wayne State University (1995)
“For Beardsley scholars in particular I believe Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque is the most important book since Stanley Weintraub’s Beardsley biography in 1967.” —Robert Langenfeld, UNC-Greensboro and Editor of ELT (1995)
“Chris Snodgrass’s new book (its subtitle is unfortunately restrictive) seems . . . the most valuable analysis of [Beardsley’s] extravagance and complexity to date. . . . What makes Snodgrass’s study particularly worthwhile is the remarkable precision of his descriptive language, and the placement of his hundred-plus illustrations of Beardsley’s 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 ‘dandy of the grotesque.’” —Stanley Weintraub, ELT 39.4 (1996)
“It is one of the merits of Chris Snodgrass’s book that he ignores neither the religious nor the biographical dimension of Beardsley’s art. . . . Through brilliantly sensitive readings of a large number of images of the grotesque and the dandy . . . he argues that Beardsley’s work creates a sense of total indeterminacy, not simply a tension playing back and forth between fixed poles, because it ‘is not a world stable enough to produce fixed poles’” —Gerald N. Izenberg, Victorian Studies (Spring 1997)
“Building upon many other scholars’ ‘readings’ of Beardsley’s illustrations and exhaustive of contemporaneous material, Snodgrass adds to them fascinating detail as he carefully illumines the way Beardsley’s drawings undercut any final, or ‘univocal,’ 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.” —Linda Zatlin, SAR 61.1 (Winter 1996) and Criticism 38.3 (Summer 1996)
“[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. [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.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (May 15, 1995)
“I 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.” —J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto (1995)
“The 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’s
cultural context, and apt appropriation of a wide spectrum of relevant theory—all
as background for a focused yet complex and original commentary of ‘texts,’
in the broad sense of that term. Professor Snodgrass, in achieving that
synthesis, has created one excellent book and laid the groundwork for a number
of others.” —Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Stanford University
(1995)
HYPERTEXT VERSION OF THE BOOK [Still Under Construction]