Download or read book The Breviary of the Decadence written by George A. Cevasco and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Rebours was published in 1884, it became a literary sensation. It influenced many of the young artists of the day, in both England and France, including Oscar Wilde.
Download or read book The Breviary of the Decadence written by George A. Cevasco and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fictions of British Decadence written by Kirsten MacLeod and published by Springer. This book was released on 2006-04-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fictions of British Decadence is a fresh account of the emergence, development and legacy of fiction written in the era of Oscar Wilde. It examines a broad range of texts by a diverse array of Decadent writers, from familiar figures such as Ernest Dowson and John Davidson to lesser-known innovators such as Arthur Machen and M.P. Shiel.
Download or read book Decadence A Very Short Introduction written by David Weir and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-09 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siècle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. The decline of Rome provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for aesthetic gain. What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of the pessimism that accompanies imperial decline. This delight in decline informs the rich canon of decadence that runs from Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores the conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence--the excess of artifice--and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth Century Novel written by Suzanne Nalbantian and published by Springer. This book was released on 1988-08-22 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative assessment of the transmutation of a decadent mentality into an identifiable narrative style. The author examines the work of five major novelists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and attempts to trace perplexities, perversities and combinations of excess.
Download or read book A Baedeker of Decadence written by George C. Schoolfield and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Decadence written by Jane Desmarais and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.
Download or read book The Jewish Decadence written by Jonathan Freedman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.
Download or read book The Symbolist Movement in Literature written by Arthur Symons and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Roman Presences written by Catharine Edwards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores aspects of the reception of ancient Rome in a number of European countries from the late eighteenth century to the end of the Second World War. Rome has been made to stand for literary authority, republican heroism, imperial power and decline, the Catholic Church, the pleasure of ruins. The studies offered here examine some of the sometimes strange and unexpected places where Roman presences have manifested themselves during this period. Scholars from several disciplines, including English literature and history of art, as well as classics, bring to bear a variety of approaches on a wide range of images and texts, from statues of Napoleon to Freud's analysis of dreams. Rome's seemingly boundless capacity for multiple, indeed conflicting, signification has made it an extraordinarily fertile paradigm for making sense of - and also for destabilizing - history, politics, identity, memory and desire.
Download or read book Decadence in the Age of Modernism written by Kate Hext and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry
Download or read book Spectrum of Decadence Routledge Revivals written by Murray Pittock and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, was an exciting and flamboyant time in British life and literature. First published in 1993, this title traces the genesis of the literary culture of the 1890s through some of the popular novels and literary texts of the period. By examining works by such writers as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Walter Pater, Murray Pittock analyses the nature of the ‘Decadent era’ and the artistic theories of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Significantly, he provides a full assessment of the lasting impact that the thought of the period has had on our own understanding of our cultural past. Spectrum of Decadence explores the confrontations between art and science, sex and mortality, desire and virtue, which, the author argues are as much a part of modern society’s fin-de-siécle as they were of the nineteenth century’s. This reissue bridges the gap between literary texts, historical context, and contemporary critical theory.
Download or read book Against Nature written by Joris-Karl Huysmans and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero of this curious novel is des Esseintes, a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell...
Download or read book French Literature written by Alison Finch and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France’s evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day. It shows the political connections between the elite literature of France and other aspects of its culture, from racism, misogyny, tolerance and liberal reform to song, street performance, advertising and cinema. The nation’s literature contributed to these and was shaped by them. The book highlights the continuities and the unique fault-lines in the society that, over a millennium, has produced ‘French culture’. It looks at France’s early and continuing struggle for a national identity through both its language and its literature, and it shows that this struggle co-exists with openness to other cultures and a bawdy or subtle rebelliousness against the Church and other forms of authority. En route it takes in cuisine, gardens and the French tradition in mathematics. The survey provides an accessible approach to key issues in the history of French culture as well as a wide context for specialists.
Download or read book Asymptote written by Robert Ziegler and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction offers a radically new approach to the psychology of Decadent creation. Rejecting traditional arguments that Decadence is a celebration of deviance and exhaustion, this study presents the fin-de-siecle novel as a transformative process, a quest for health. By allowing the writer to project into fiction unwanted traits and destructive tendencies – by permitting the playful invention of provisional identities –, Decadent creation itself becomes a dynamic act of creative regeneration. In describing the interrelationship of Decadent authors and their fictions, Asymptote uses the mathematical figure of the asymptote to show how they converge, then split apart, and grow distant. The author’s approach to the facsimile selves he plays with and discards is the curve that never merges with his authorial identity. In successive chapters, this study describes the Decadents’ experimentation with perversion (Huysmans’s A rebours and Mendes’s Zo’har), and their subsequent validation of social regulation and creative discipline. It examines magic and its appeal to fantasies of elitism and omnipotence (Péladan’s Le Vice supreme and Villiers’s Axël ), then shows authors embracing the values of community and service. It considers the Decadent text as a vehicle of change in which an artist ventilates fantasies of aggression and revenge (Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chamber and Rachilde’s La Marquise de Sade) then employs writing as the means by which these feelings are discharged. It examines creation as a form of play, “une aliénation grâce à laquelle l’esprit se récupère sous la forme des autres” (Schwob’s Vies imaginaries and Lorrain’s Histoires de masques), yet notes the Decadents’ decision to return to a single generative center. Finally, it examines creation as an expression of artistic transience and failure, yet shows the Decadents’ success in commemorating the very forces of disintegration (Rodenbach’s L’Art en exil). In considering the Decadents’ insistence on subjectivism and aloneness, this study concludes (Gourmont’s Sixtine) by showing their wish to escape the prison of identity and to redefine their art as cooperative creation.
Download or read book Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Si cle written by Frances Knight and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period known as the fin de siecle - defined in this groundbreaking book as chiefly the period between1885 and 1901 - was a fluid and unsettling epoch of optimism and pessimism, endings and beginnings, aswell as of new forms of creativity and anxiety. The end of the century has attracted much interest from scholars of literary and cultural studies, who regard it as a critical moment in the history of their disciplines; but it has been relatively ignored by religious historians. Frances Knight here sets right that neglect. She shows how late Victorian society (often said to be one of the most intensely Christian cultures the world has ever seen) reacted to the bold agendas being set by the thinkers of the fin de siecle; and how prominent Church figures during the era first identified many of the concerns that have preoccupied Christians latterly. These include an active interest in social justice and the creation of new types of communities; increasingly open discussion of the sexual exploitation of children; debates about society's 'decadence'; new ideas about the role of women; and the belief in the redemptive powers of art, pioneered by figures as diverse as P.T. Forsyth, Percy Dearmer and Samuel and Henrietta Barnett.Examining in particular the Christian world of fin de siecle London, the author offers penetrating insights intoa society in which the ritual and culture of Christianity sometimes permeated the aesthetic movement andwhere devotees of the aesthetic movement - like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and their disciples - often revealed a fascination with Christianity. She argues that the 'long 1890s' was a decisive decade in which various sections of Christian opinion, both on the progressive and the more conservative wings of the faith, began to express views which set the tone for attitudes which would become commonplace in the twentieth century. Victorian Christianity at the Fin de Siecle is the focussed treatment of religion and culture at the end of the nineteenth century that the field has long needed. It will be welcomed by scholars of church history, social and cultural history and the history of ideas.
Download or read book Against Nature written by J.-K. Huysmans and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2011-02-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. 'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As J -K Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. The hero, des Esseintes, is a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa. Here, accompanied only by a couple of silent servants, he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems, and complex perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments, starting with the decision to give his giant pet tortoise a jewel-encrusted shell... "Huysmans' study of obsession and aesthetics got up no end of reviewers' noses on its 1884 publication. It�s not hard to see why: decadent aristocrat Jean Floressas des Esseintes, afflicted by nerves so grievous they cause his spine to freeze when he sees a servant wringing out washing, takes turns kicking out at classical poets, modern novelists and the church. The poor are grotesque, the rich are decaying and the bourgeoisie simply insufferable. Only Dickens, Baudelaire and the odd enema provide respite. Cloistered in an opulent house in the suburbs of Paris, Des Esseintes undertakes a series of experiments in living which prove to be an absolute hoot. He decorates an unfortunate tortoise with precious stones, tries to go to England, but only makes it as far as a nearby pub, and attempts to turn an urchin into a killer by buying him credit at a brothel. This largely plotless mix of bilious satire, broad comedy and literary criticism may have lost some of its immediacy, but it remains a captivating, contradictory work of art." James Smart in The Guardian
