A NOVEL OF CELIBACY: SWINBURNE’S LESBIA BRANDON
A NOVEL OF CELIBACY: SWINBURNE’S LESBIA BRANDON
Author(s): Roxana PatrașSubject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai
Keywords: roman célibataire; indirection; seriality; memory; decadence; androgyny.
Summary/Abstract: A Novel of Celibacy: Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon. Swinburne’s lost masterpiece, Lesbia Brandon, is a text that reflects upon the burden of family memory and on the ways a particular individual could escape the reproduction chain. Caught at different ages, Beauty represents for the Decadent writer a state of unequalled perfection, which can be neither expressed nor related to a referent. In this context, celibacy becomes the social condition of Beauty as well as an aesthetic form. A novel with bachelors and about celibate, Swinburne’s Lesbia Brandon transcends its shocking premises (lesbianism, incest, violence, flogging) and reveals itself as a meditation on the evanescent condition of mortal beauty. Along with his favored typologies and themes, Swinburne also devised here a different way to think the relationship between authoritarian (complementary partners) and egalitarian love (equal or identical partners) within the wider ideological frame of republicanism.
Journal: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai - Philologia
- Issue Year: 62/2017
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 123-142
- Page Count: 20
- Language: English