ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of key concepts of preceding subsequent chapters. It focuses on and provides the first scholarly analysis of Mallet's first novel. The chapter also focuses on the material, discursive and aesthetic production of physical, cultural, sexual and textual deviance. The chapter also explores the significance of Velasquez's art at the turn of the century, in order to highlight the crucial role played in the novel by the Spanish artist's dwarf painting and its gaze. Importantly, even though she showed herself a fundamentally Aesthetic writer in her attention to form, beauty and the sister arts, Malet was equally dedicated to observation and a follower of the French school of Naturalism from the start, which explains why so many of her novels were considered scandalous. The present volume intends to show that the Modernists were in fact building on techniques and tactics which had been uniquely explored by late-Victorian Aesthetic novelists such as Malet.
