By: Christian M. Chensvold

What Never Dies
Barbey D’Aurevilly, translated by Oscar Wilde (as Sebastian Melmoth)

In addition to penning the breviary of dandyism, Barbey D’Aurevilly wrote volumes of fiction in which formidable dandies face seductive women, with melodramatic consequences designed to shock his readers. Unpublished in his lifetime – and for good reason – “What Never Dies” was recently reprinted in an English translation by Oscar Wilde. Sin was one of Barbey’s central themes, and this elephantine tome is a heinous tresspass even God could not expiate. (more…)

By Michael Mattis

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
James Abbot McNeil Whistler
Introduction by Alfred Werner
Dover Publications

Being accosted by a fellow American in London put Gilded Age painter and dandy James Abbot McNeill Whistler into a caustic funk. When the uppity new newcomer had the temerity to suggest that he and Whistler had both been born in the same town of Lowell, Massachusetts, the painter really began to get nonplussed. He adjusted his monocle and said coldly, “I do not choose to be born at Lowell.”

Whistler was a painter of no mean talent. His style was his own — a non-literal interpretation of reality that embodied traits of aestheticism and impressionism, but through a unique lens. His reputation among critics has risen and fallen over the years, but has recently been back on the uptick, with a number of critical biographies and museum retrospectives. He was often treated with less respect in his own day: His pictures form a dangerous precedence… Another crop of Mr. Whistler’s little jokes… Criticism is powerless here… Whistler is eminently vulgar… flinging a pot of paint into the public’s face. (more…)

By: Christian M. Chensvold

Vile Emperors and Elegant Degenerates: The Dedalus Book of English Decadence
James Willsher, Ed.
Dedalus Books

One semester into a master’s degree in comparative literature, I realized that academic obligations were interfering with my sense of taste. Pouring over “The Decameron” brought nothing but resentment when what I wanted to be doing was solving some enigma of Mallarmé.

I immediately left the program. (more…)