The Art of Scandal

Download or read book The Art of Scandal written by Sean Latham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-23 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Art of Scandal advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers and readers throughout the early twentieth century revived the long-despised codes and habits of the roman à clef as a key part of that larger assault on Victorian realism we now call modernism. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the intricate relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. Latham uses the genre to reconfigure modernism's development as a cultural practice diffused across texts and the networks of reception and circulation in which they are embedded. Writers like James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Oscar Wilde, and D.H. Lawrence deliberately employed elements of the roman à clef, only to find that it possessed an uncanny and even dangerous agency of its own--one that resonated through a complex system of publicity and constraint. Bringing these effects fully into view requires a mixture of close reading and archival excavation that proceeds here in chapters on the anonymous case study, Oscar Wilde's trial, libel law, celebrity salons, and Parisian bohemia. The Art of Scandal thus both salvages the roman à clef and traces its weird itinerary through the early twentieth century. In the process, it elaborates an expansive concept of modernism that interweaves coterie culture with the mass media, psychology with celebrity, and literature with the law.