Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries: Architectures of Aristocracy in Ireland and the American South
- 1 Oaks, Serpents and Dandies: Pseudoaristocracy in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn
- 2 The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde's Trip through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
- 3 Ferocious Beauty: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter and the Modernist Female Dandy
- Epilogue The Dandy Unmasked: Emma Donoghue's ‘Words for Things’ and Tim Grimsley's Dream Boy
- Works Cited and Consulted
- Index
Introduction - Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries: Architectures of Aristocracy in Ireland and the American South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries: Architectures of Aristocracy in Ireland and the American South
- 1 Oaks, Serpents and Dandies: Pseudoaristocracy in Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn
- 2 The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde's Trip through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
- 3 Ferocious Beauty: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter and the Modernist Female Dandy
- Epilogue The Dandy Unmasked: Emma Donoghue's ‘Words for Things’ and Tim Grimsley's Dream Boy
- Works Cited and Consulted
- Index
Summary
Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known …
W. B. Yeats, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’[H]e was a good architect; Quentin knew the house, twelve miles from Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished. And not only an architect, General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne […] Sutpen's ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castlelike magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!In 1845, following the publication of his The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass escaped recapture by travelling through the British Isles, lecturing on the American abolitionist movement. Visiting Ireland on the eve of the Famine, he drew comparisons between destitute Irish peasants living as tenants on Anglo-Irish estates and African-American slaves living on plantations in the American South:
[Irish peasants] lacked only black skin and woolly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro. The open, uneducated, mouth – the long gaunt arm – the badly formed foot and ankle – the shuffling gait – the retreating forehead and vague expression – and their petty quarrels and fights – all reminded me of the plantation.
(Qtd in Rice 1999: 122)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dandy in Irish and American Southern FictionAristocratic Drag, pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007