From Hyacinth Robinson to Nick Dormer : Variations on the Myth of Endymion, A Case of Suspended Transmission

Abstract : As the authentic artist needs to go through stages of transgression and destruction, his art is closely linked to satire, if only by the fact that it tears down and reconstructs older forms of art to create new ones. Yet he does not so out of ignorance or disrespect for the past, and a revolutionary appears as a dead end. Simultaneously in order to distance himself from adademicism and aestheticism and in particular from the public figure of Oscar Wilde, Henry James satirized different personae of the dilettante and used to myth of Endymion to embody his own relation with art.