Worded nicely

Just things that I have read in my travels whilst researching that I think are worded really nicely....in that they are really descriptive and they do a nice job of conjuring up a precise image in your mind.
I found them from an essay on Aubrey Beardsley: "Liminality & Ambiguity: graphic gender lines and uncertainty in Beardsley"

"If this visual carnival were not sufficient surprise, Beardsley catches our searching

eye and focuses it on scopic desire by replacing the nipples and navel of the statue with

staring eyes making the reader, in an amazing reversal, the subject of the voyeuristic

gaze."

p6

The critics were puzzled and confused by the self-conscious absence

of naturalism in modern French art. They saw it as the symptom of a

degenerative national psychosis, and they resented its intrusion into

English art. A non-naturalistic style was, they argued, the sign of a

declining sense of tradition and an all-pervasive moral laxity. (63)

p63 of p7

“the bold graphic stylization and abstraction of form practiced by the Japanese

artists…such as Utamaro and Hokuyei” that drew and influenced Beardsley’s work (68).

p68 of p7

Additionally, the androgyny of Beardsley’s figures ran counter to the increasing

influence of science and its clear-cut system of taxonomy. The ambiguously gendered

figure does not fit into the system of categories except as an “other” or deviant

expression. Sturgis explains “the twin-sexed hermaphrodite was a figure of particular

fascination during the late nineteenth century…its ‘cursed beauty’ a symbol of selfsufficiency,

sexual confusion and the anti-natural” (96). The phrase ‘cursed beauty’ is

telling as it reveals the Victorian dilemma of simultaneous attraction to and repulsion

from Beardsley’s potent androgynous figures.