Inverting the Renaissance, fashioning the self: Thomas Mann, Oscar Wilde, and fin -de -siecle sexual dissidence

This work examines the ways in which discourses of individualism and of the Renaissance were implicated in discourses of sexuality in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britain and Germany. I contend that nineteenth-century historiographers of the Renaissance privileged a set of topoi---notably experimental individualism, self-aestheticization, and criminality---that also played a vital but critically neglected role in the genealogy of the modern homosexual. In fictional and non-fictional works, turn-of-the-century sexual dissidents such as Adolf Brand, Edward Carpenter, Benedict Friedlaender, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), John Henry Mackay, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds turned to Renaissance-inspired notions of self-culture that at once confirmed their personal integrity, encouraged them (theoretically, at least) to live out their sexual lives to the fullest extent, and allowed them either to dismiss all laws as oppressive or to reevaluate the very notion of crime. Taking Thomas Mann's and Oscar Wilde's absorption of the Renaissance in particular as examples, I show how engagement with this controversial era could offer important means of self-justification as well as practical models to turn-of-the-century German and British sexual dissidents.