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Artist stories of the 1890s: life, art, and sacrifice

Book Contribution - Chapter

This chapter offers an analysis of a representative selection of artist stories from the 1890s: short stories with an artist protagonist, written by both male and female authors. The analysis aims to show, first, how the genre of the short story allows for greater flexibility than the artist novel in treating such recurrent themes as the tension between art and life, the concept of artistic greatness or the moral dimension of art and the artist. Second, it argues that the different takes on these themes presented in the stories cannot easily be reduced to the literary faction fights of the period: new realists vs. aesthetes or aesthetes vs. new woman writers. Instead, the stories present serious meditations on the nature of art and the role of the artist; in this way they anticipate the exploration of these concerns in modernist short stories.
Book: Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism. Continuities, Revisions, Speculations
Pages: 92 - 106
ISBN:9781138640771
Publication year:2017