| Title | 2. A Foetal Laboratory and Its Influence |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Evanghelia Stead(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0413.02 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0413/chapters/10.11647/obp.0413.02 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Evanghelia Stead |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2024-10-11 |
| Long abstract | Chapter 2, A Foetal Laboratory and Its Influence, studies the foetus motif in Beardsley’s oeuvre from its earliest provocative advent in Incipit Vita Nova (1892) and among the Bon-Mots vignettes up to the untimely end of his career. I grant primacy not to biographical detail (as usual in prior scholarship) but to the motif’s creative and cultural bearings, and its challenging manifesto-like value as portrait of a generation. The chapter shows the foetus’s symbolic meaning for the decadent post-Darwinian zeitgeist and stresses its role as a plastic and morphing stimulus with immediate effect on fin-de-siècle graphic design. It analyses the motif's influence and spread in the work of German artist Marcus Behmer (foetal variations), Dutchman Karel de Nérée tot Babberich (mises en abyme), and French anarchist Jossot (defending caricature as a superior form of deforming art). |
| Page range | pp. 57–106 |
| Print length | 50 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Linguist, literary translator and honorary Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France, Evanghelia Stead is Professor of Comparative Literature and Print Culture at the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin (UVSQ Paris-Saclay). In 2023 she brought the TIGRE seminar on literature, visual and print culture to UVSQ, which she had been running in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure (Department of the Arts) since 2004. She has been honoured internationally with visiting professorships at Marburg and Verona Universities, and won numerous sponsored research fellowships (CNRS, EURIAS/FRIAS, IUF, Beinecke). She has published extensively on fin-de-siècle culture, periodicals, history of the book, literature and iconography, Greek and Latin myths in modern literature, and the literary tradition of ‘the Thousand and Second Night.’ A well-known specialist on fin-de-siècle art and culture, she has also developed methodologies for periodical studies, expertise on reading books as cultural objects, reading with images, and through literature-related visual art.