Chapter 1 Aubrey Beardsley: Emblem
of the Victorian Decadence
(introduction; see abstract)
Chapter 2 The Urge to Outrage: The
Rhetoric of Scandal
Examines Beardsley’s desire to violate and destabilize
conventional boundaries of decorum and how this iconoclastic “urge to outrage”
functioned as a rhetorical imperative in his art, imposing a distinctive,
personal “signature” on the ruling canonical order.
Chapter 3 The Craving for Authority:
Rescue and Redemption
Investigates the “opposite pole” of the Beardsleyan
“dialectic,” Beardsley’s equally strong and often simultaneously demonstrated
need to affirm and incorporate traditional authority—reflected 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. The chapter shows how Beardsley’s
ostensibly iconoclastic deviance often proved to be an ironically conservative
strategy, oddly fortifying the foundations of the very Victorian mores it
critiqued.
Chapter 4 The Rhetoric of the Grotesque:
Monsters as Emblems
Analyzes how the grotesque, extending the basic paradox
of Beardsley’s art, became for Beardsley an emblem for life’s potentially
“monstrous” metaphysical dislocations. 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—male/female,
culture/nature, ethereal/animal, sacred/profane, good/evil, victimizer/victim,
freedom/imprisonment, unity/estrangement, et cetera.
Chapter 5 The Beardsleyan Dandy:
Icon of Paradox
Demonstrates 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’s paradoxical
iconoclastic authoritarianism.
Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Parody:
Signing and Resigning the Canon
Pulls together the various parallel planes—both personal
and figurative—of the previous chapters to show how Beardsley's “dandiacal”
sensibility employed the grotesque not only figuratively but rhetorically.
Utilizing the grotesque in the service of parody, Beardsley radically realigned
canonical meaning, creating a style of canonical “deformation” and recuperation—in
effect, a “caricature of signification.”
HYPERTEXT VERSION OF THE BOOK [Still Under Construction]