H. D and the Victorian Fin de Siecle argues foremost that H. D. eluded the male modernist flight from Romantic 'effeminacy' and 'personality' by embracing the very cults of personality in the Decadent Romanticism of Oscar Wilde, A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and D. G. Rossetti that her male contemporaries most deplored: the cult of the demonic femme fatale and of the 'effeminate' Aesthete androgyne. H. D., Laity maintains, used these sexually aggressive masks to shape a female modernism that freely engaged female and male androgyny, homoeroticism, narcissism and maternal eroticism. Focusing on the early Sea Garden, the plays and poetry of the 1920s and her late epic Trilogy, H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle demonstrates H. D.'s shift from the homoerotic 'white', vanishing tropology of the male androgyne fashioned by Pater and Wilde to the 'abject' monstrously sexual body of the Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent femme fatale.
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Dramatis Personae: The Aesthete Androgyne and the Femme Fatale; 1. The Rhetoric of Anti-Romanticism: gendered genealogies of male modernism; 2. H. D.'s Early Decadent Masks and Images: HER; Sea Garden; Part I. The Aesthete Androgyne: 3. Writing the Decadent Boy Androgyne: Whiteness, Diaphaneite, Poikilia and Male Statuary; 4. Across Gender, across Sexuality: H. D.'s male masking and the sexual narrative: Hippolytus Temporarizes, 'Heliodroa'; Part II. The Femme Fatale: 5. Towards a Revised Myth of Origins: from the diaphanous androgyne to the abject femme fatale; 6. From Agon to 'Heros Fatale': Pre-Raphaelite transformations of male modernism/modernity; 7. Feminine Abjection and Trilogy; Postscript; Notes; Index.
