Synonyms
Definition
The dandy and dandyism form a distinctive feature of nineteenth century urban life in London and Paris especially, but throughout Europe generally including St. Petersburg. Writing about the phenomenon of dandyism in “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire thought the dandy had a burning desire “to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions” (Baudelaire 1972: 420), a figure representing the “last flicker of heroism in decadent ages” (421). He defines the dandy-type as one of those beings who “have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking. Thus they possess… both time and money without which fantasy, reduced to the state of ephemeral reveries, can scarcely be translated into...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Baudelaire, Charles. 1972. Selected writings on art and artists. Trans. P. E Charet. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades project. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kein McLoughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
D’Aurevilly, Jules Barbey. 1988. Dandyism. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. New York: PAJ Publications.
Driver, Sam. 1985. The dandy in Pushkin. The Slavic and East European Journal 29: 243–257.
Feldman, Jessica R. 1993. Gender on the divide: The dandy in modernist literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hammarberg, Gitta. 2008. Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus: Gogol’s overcoats. Russian Review 67: 395–414.
Kelly, Ian. 2005. Beau Brummell: The ultimate dandy. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Moers, Ellen. 1960. The dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and Warburg.
Showalter, Elaine, ed. 1993. Daughters of decadence: Women writers of the fin de siecle. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Stanton, Domna C. 1980. The aristocrat as art: A study of the honnête homme and the dandy in seventeenth- and nineteenth-century literature. New York: Columbia University Press.
Thomas, Dominic. 2003. Fashion matters: “La Sape” and vestimentary codes in transnational contexts and urban diasporas. MLN 118 (4): 947–973.
Wohlfarth, Irving. 1970. Perte d’Auréole: The emergence of the dandy. Modern Language Notes 85: 529–571.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Tambling, J. (2018). The Dandy. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_85-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_85-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62592-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Humanities