Aesthetes
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In England, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an aesthete was a person who was usually well-educated, had exaggerated tastes and cultivated a style of dress and manner calculated to annoy the mainstream of intellectual society. Oscar Wilde might be designated the archetypal aesthete, and aesthetes of note were usually found in London or Oxford University and were often well-connected, if not already in the heart of fashionable social circles. There is a whiff of decadence associated with aesthetes. Aesthetes were often queer or adopted a queer posture, and the Oxford aesthete is also associated with a form of camp.
Compton Mackenzie's novel Sinister Street makes use of the type as a phase through which the protagonist passes under the influence of older, decadent individuals. The novels of Evelyn Waugh, who was a young participant in aesthete society at Oxford, portray the aesthete mostly from a satirical point of view, but also from that of an insider. Some names associated with this loose assemblage are Robert Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Acton, Nancy Mitford, and Anthony Powell.
In the popular Calvin and Hobbes comic book, "The Revenge of the Babysat," Calvin states that he and Hobbes are aesthetes because they are playing in the mud to annoy their mother.
See also
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