The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.
• Provides a compelling narrative of Victorian sexualities, showing the shift from nineteenth-century aestheticism and decadence to twentieth-century modernism • Offers a vivid portrait of literary London in the 1910s and in the build-up to the First World War, detailing the artistic consequences that ensued in its aftermath • Presents an original narrative of theatricality, in both art and life, from nineteenth-century dandyism to the phenomenon of 'masculinist' modernism
Contents
Introduction: modernism's blasted history; Part I. Decadence Rising: The Violence of Aestheticism: 1. Revolution of the senses; 2. Victorian sexual aesthetics; 3. Culture, corruption, criminality; 4. A malady of dreaming: The Picture of Dorian Gray; Part II. Modernism's Breach: The Violence of Aesthetics: 5. Prologue: transgression displaced; 6. No dreaming pale flowers; 7. Modernist sexual politics; 8. Maximum energy (like a hurricane); 9. Forbidden planet: Heart of Darkness; Epilogue: traumas of the world; Notes; Bibliography.
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