⟪Sensitive and ambiguous⟫ androgyny in Fin de Siecle art and literature

Androgyny is one of the most recurrent motifs in art and literature since Romanticism, but the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consecrated it as a quintessential expression of a world in crisis and a decadent society. The artists and writers of the Symbolist period reclaimed this heterodox vision of sexuality and approached the subject, not so much in relation to its mythological and anthropological origins-the restoration of a supposedly lost unity of the authentic self-but as an aesthetic reaction to positivist objectivity and as an affirmation of a dissident identity-overcoming moral conventions-that sought to turn life into artifice. This article proposes a survey of European fin de si & egrave;cle art and literature, with special attention to Spanish modernist poetry, in order to highlight the relevance of the subject and its relationship with the aesthetic and social transformations that paved the way towards modernity.