Download or read book The Decadent Society written by Ross Douthat and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.
Download or read book Decadent Style written by John Robert Reed and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Decadent Style, John Reed defines "decadent art" broadly enough to encompass literature, music, and the visual arts and precisely enough to examine individual works in detail. Reed focuses on the essential characteristics of this style and distinguishes it from non-esthetic categories of "decadent artists" and "decadent themes." Like the natural sciences and psychology, the arts in the late nineteenth century reflect an interest in the process of atomization. Literature and the other arts mirror this interest by developing, or rather elaborating, existing forms to the point of what appears to be dissolution. Instead of these forms dissolving, however, they require their audience's participation and thus involve a new order. Reed argues that this process of reordering characterizes decadent style, which depends upon sensory provocation resolvable only through negation and is therefore bounded by philosophical and emotional assumptions of inevitable frustration. Drawing upon the literature, music, and visual arts of England and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Reed provides a widely ranging and authoritative overview of decadent style, which relates such artists as Huysmans, Wilde, D'Annunzio, Moreau, Bresdin, Klimt, Klinger, Wagner, and Strauss. He related decadent style to Pre-Raphaelite and Naturalist preoccupation with detail and to aesthetic and Symbolist fascination with sensibility and idealism. Ultimately, Reed argues, decadent style is a late stage of Romanticism, overshadowed by Symbolism but anticipating, in its attempt to yoke incompatibilities and to engender a new cerebral form, some of the main traits of Modernism.
Download or read book Decadence written by Alex Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of cinema on Decadence, and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde.
Download or read book Decadent Subjects written by Charles Bernheimer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2002-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association Charles Bernheimer described decadence as a "stimulant that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds." In this posthumously published work, Bernheimer succeeds in making a critical concept out of this perennially fashionable, rarely understood term. Decadent Subjects is a coherent and moving picture of fin de siècle decadence. Mature, ironic, iconoclastic, and thoughtful, this remarkable collection of essays shows the contradictions of the phenomenon, which is both a condition and a state of mind. In seeking to show why people have failed to give a satisfactory account of the term decadence, Bernheimer argues that we often mistakenly take decadence to represent something concrete, that we see as some sort of agent. His salutary response is to return to those authors and artists whose work constitutes the topos of decadence, rereading key late nineteenth-century authors such as Nietzsche, Zola, Hardy, Wilde, Moreau, and Freud to rediscover the very dynamics of the decadent. Through careful analysis of the literature, art, and music of the fin de siècle including a riveting discussion of the many faces of Salome, Bernheimer leaves us with a fascinating and multidimensional look at decadence, all the more important as we emerge from our own fin de siècle.
Download or read book Decadence and Catholicism written by Ellis Hanson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book. Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.
Download or read book Decadent Poetics written by J. Hall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe.
Download or read book The Decadent World View written by Brian Stableford and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new collection features 14 essays relevant to the Literary Decadence movement, including pieces on: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Aloysius Bertrand, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, and Anatole France. Complete with bibliography and index.
Download or read book Landscapes of Decadence written by Alex Murray and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-12 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between literary politics and the politics of place in fin-de-siècle travel and place-based literature.
Download or read book Oscar Wilde in Context written by Kerry Powell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concise and illuminating articles explore Oscar Wilde's life and work in the context of the turbulent landscape of his time.
Download or read book Decadent Culture in the United States written by David Weir and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Culture in the United States traces the development of the decadent movement in America from its beginnings in the 1890s to its brief revival in the 1920s. During the fin de siècle, many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline since the frontier had ended and the country's "manifest destiny" seemed to be fulfilled. Decadence—the cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy so familiar in nineteenth-century Europe—was thus taken up by groups of artists and writers in major American cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Noting that the capitalist, commercial context of America provided possibilities for the entrance of decadence into popular culture to a degree that simply did not occur in Europe, David Weir argues that American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons. By going against the grain of dominant social and cultural trends, American writers produced a native variant of Continental Decadence that eventually dissipated "upward" into the rising leisure class and "downward" into popular, commercial culture.
Download or read book Decadent Image written by Kostas Boyiopoulos and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-17 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson.
Download or read book Decadent Orientalisms written by David Fieni and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadent Orientalisms presents a sustained critique of the ways Orientalism and decadence have formed a joint discursive mode of the imperial imagination. Attentive to historical and literary configurations of language, race, religion, and power, Fieni shows the importance of understanding Western discourses of Eastern decline and obsolescence together with Arab and Islamic responses in which the language of decadence returns as a characteristic of the West. Taking seriously Edward Said's claim that Orientalism is a "style of having power," Fieni works historically through the aesthetic and ideological effects of Orientalist style, showing how it is at once comparative, descriptive, and performative. Orientalism, the book argues, relies upon decadence as the figure through which its positivist scientific claims become redistributed as speech acts--"truths" that establish dominance. Rather than attending to Orientalism as a repertoire of clichés and stereotypes, Decadent Orientalisms considers the systemic epistemological consequences of the diffuse, yet coherent network of institutions that have constituted Orientalism's power.
Download or read book The Decadent Republic of Letters written by Matthew Potolsky and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. In The Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation. The Decadent Republic of Letters looks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated, The Decadent Republic of Letters unearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.
Download or read book Decadent Conservatism written by Alex Murray and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of the art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatism turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.
Download or read book Decadent and Occult Works by Arthur Machen written by Dennis Denisoff and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2018-07-11 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthur Machen has finally been recognized as a key contributor to the glittering age of British Decadence. Best known for the novella The Great God Pan and for his formative influence on weird fiction, in fact much of Machen’s writing profoundly challenges literary and cultural convention. From the demonic horror of “The Recluse of Bayswater” to the plush occultism of The Hill of Dreams and the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade, this selection of works from throughout Machen’s career brings to life his unique symbolist aesthetics and spiritual philosophy. This is the first edition of Machen’s work to foreground his Decadent and occult writing. It includes a scholarly introduction, extensive annotations, and revealing contextual materials. Engaging with the gems of Machen’s oeuvre, the collection invites readers to open their minds to a reality beyond the veil, the reality – in Machen’s view – that matters most.
Download or read book Decadent Short Story written by Kostas Boyiopoulos and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging anthology showcases for the first time the short story as the most attractive genre for British writers who experimented with Decadent themes and styles. The selections represent the important role that magazine culture played in th
Download or read book The Legend of the Decadents written by Gustave Leopold Van Roosbroeck and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
