The dandy in literature: analyzing the language of the literature of dandyism

The article attempts to research the literature of dandyism as a separate literary movement. Based on the fact that dandies stand out as a special social subculture connected not only with fashion, the author makes an assumption about the peculiarities of speech in literature about dandies, written by dandies. This assumption was made on the basis of D. Schaeffer’s studies, emphasizing that dandies actively studied ancient rhetoric and used sophistry methods. First of all, the paper identifies and groups features inherent in the literature of dandyism at different language levels. Dandyist self-presentation through ‘artificial femininity’ (a term of Penson) made it also reasonable to analyze the features of gender construction by linguistic means. The article aims to prove that the literature of dandyism has reason to be regarded as a special movement based on its key features. The author considered it more appropriate to focus separately on the language of the writer and the language of the hero, because both have their own peculiarities. There were chosen three works written in different languages: Wings by M. Kuzmin, The Picture of Dorian Gray by О. Wilde and À Rebours by J. K. Huysmans, which were studied based on the method of linguistic analysis. These works appear to be the most representative for the aims of analysis because they were written by dandy writers about dandy heroes. The paper concludes that a speech portrait of a male dandy hero does not always correspond to gender characteristics of his speech construction, since femininity and androgyny prevail over masculinity. There was identified a wide range of lexical tools employed by the writers, which is shown in the paper to be one of the specific linguistic features of dandyist literature. According to the results of analysis, the language of the writers is not much different from the language of the dandy heroes; however, in dialogues of the latter, the ‘dandyist performative’ is manifested more often.