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
2 - The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde's Trip through Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha
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
One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian GrayBut I never saw it. I do not even know of my own knowledge that Ellen ever saw it, that Judith ever loved it, that Henry slew it, so who will dispute me when I say, Why did I not invent, create it? … It would not even need a skull behind it; almost anonymous, it would only need vague inference of some walking flesh and blood desired by someone else even if only in some shadow realm of make-believe. – A picture seen by stealth, by creeping … into the deserted midday room to look at it.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!In the final chapter of Jefferson Davis, American, William J. Cooper concludes his biography of the South's enigmatic president by describing a curious encounter. In 1882, a near-bankrupt Davis was living on Mississippi's Gulf coast at Beauvoir, a ‘raised cottage … [of] considerable size … Greek Revival details, and extensive grounds’ (Cooper 2000: 611). Attempts to reinvigorate Briarfield, his family's Mississippi plantation, were failing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dandy in Irish and American Southern FictionAristocratic Drag, pp. 71 - 124Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007