Aubrey Beardsley and the Queer Moment of the Victorian Little Magazine

Aubrey Beardsley and the Queer Moment of the Victorian Little Magazine

About the talk...

This talk explores how Victorian little magazines—avant-garde periodicals focusing on literary and visual arts—provided a nexus for queer artistic expression and collaboration in late-Victorian Britain. The coteries that formed around these little magazines became known for their queer-coded art, especially through their adoption of experimental narrative and representational strategies associated with the Decadent Movement. However, this queer reputation also attracted homophobic backlash: in the wake of the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials, the most successful little magazine, The Yellow Book, fired its leading artist, Aubrey Beardsley, for his public association with Wilde. Together with other disaffected contributors to The Yellow Book, Beardsley founded a rival periodical, The Savoy, providing a refuge for the Decadent avant-garde. Examining the image-text dynamics Beardsley employs in his literary, visual, and editorial contributions to The Savoy, and drawing on queer theories of temporality, narratology, and bibliography, I argue that Beardsley develops novel queer narrative and representational strategies that foreground sexual and gender non-conformance and redirect narrative attention toward the present moment of aesthetic encounter, inviting readers to participate in the magazine’s queer aesthetics. The Savoy thus provided a multimodal site of resistance to the homophobic and anti-decadent culture in the wake of the Wilde trials and set a trajectory for queer expression and collaboration at the Victorian fin-de-siècle.

About the speaker...

Robert (Robbie) Steele is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and the Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto. His SSHRC-funded dissertation analyzes how illustration-text dynamics in the Victorian illustrated novel function as a nexus for queer expression and interaction, especially in their complications of narrative time and the embodied experience of reading. He is also a Junior Fellow at Massey College and a Printing Fellow in Massey College’s Robertson Davies Library, where he has recently curated an exhibition entitled Unbound: Queerness and the Book Arts, 1850–1987.

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