The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept
exemplified in such works as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray,
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 precedents 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 siècle 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 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.