The aesthetic movement dominated the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It was significant for the role women played in it at a time when there were growing opportunities for them, both artistically and professionally. The material in this collection provides a representative selection of essays, fiction, poetry and drama by female authors.

The aesthetic movement dominated the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It was significant for the role women played in it at a time when there were growing opportunities for them, both artistically and professionally. The material in this collection provides a representative selection of essays, fiction, poetry and drama by female authors.

The aesthetic movement dominated the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It was significant for the role women played in it at a time when there were growing opportunities for them, both artistically and professionally. The material in this collection provides a representative selection of essays, fiction, poetry and drama by female authors.

Schaffer (English, Queens College, City U. of New York) analyzes the complex dialogue between male and female aesthetes in late Victorian England, exploring the heretofore insufficiently recognized role that women such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, and others played in this influential late Victorian literary movement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp’s radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D’Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women’s writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Women’s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright. Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wilde’s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image – both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism – thus we can call Wilde’s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.

In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.