Abstract
A persistent myth has it that Beau Brummell was the first, and perhaps only, dandy. With his beautiful appearance, he was very popular among the British beau monde. However, if one directs one’s gaze away from the capitals of nineteenth-century Europe towards antebellum America, one finds an entirely different discourse on dandyism. Across the Atlantic, in the rural community of Albany, New York, one finds an early example of the negative discourse on dandyism. As soon as the European press started to write about dandies, the American press abounds in references to this figure as well. There, in a farmer’s magazine titled The Plough Boy, a whole discourse on dandyism emerged, centring upon one image, namely that of the dandy-insect.
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de Vugt, G. (2018). The Dandy-Insect. In: Political Dandyism in Literature and Art. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90896-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90896-0_2
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90895-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-90896-0
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