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 Decadence Degeneration and the End written by Marja Härmänmaa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-19 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and literature during the European fin-de-siècle period often manifested themes of degeneration and decay, both of bodies and civilizations, as well as illness, bizarre sexuality, and general morbidity. This collection explores these topics in relation to artists and writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.

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 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 MeToo and Modernism written by Robin E. Field and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #MeToo and Modernism offers a blend of cultural, historical, literary, and pedagogical responses applied to the themes behind today’s ongoing #MeToo Movement. This volume is organized into four sections: a three-part chronological response in which scholars analyze literary understandings of how ripples of the #MeToo Movement began to emerge in Modernist literature, followed by a pedagogical section on how to incorporate such teachings in university classrooms. Editors Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan foreword the collection with an introduction answering the question of why such a volume is necessary in today’s educational landscape. The introduction summarizes the current scholarship regarding #MeToo and Modernism, while also uncovering the omissions, particularly in approaching nonbinary or queer writers, as well as writers of color, that still exist; as a response, many of these essays attempt to approach these gaps. Furthermore, the introduction shows how more traditional Modernist writers--including Woolf, Forster, Wells, and Joyce--served as forerunners of early glimmers of the #MeToo Movement in Modernist Literature.

Download or read book Music and Decadence in European Modernism written by Stephen Downes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

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 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 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 Hotel Modernisms written by Anna Despotopoulou and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores the hotel as a site of modernity, a space of mobility and transience that shaped the transnational and transcultural modernist activity of the first half of the twentieth century. As a trope for social and cultural mobility, transitory and precarious modes of living, and experiences of personal and political transformation, the hotel space in modernist writing complicates binaries such as public and private, risk and rootedness, and convention and experimentation. It is also a prime location for modernist production and the cross-fertilization of heterogeneous, inter- and trans- literary, cultural, national, and affective modes. The study of the hotel in the work of authors such as E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Kay Boyle, and Joseph Roth reveals the ways in which the hotel nuances the notions of mobilities, networks, and communities in terms of gender, nation, and class. Whereas Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, Anaïs Nin, and Denton Welch negotiate affective and bodily states which arise from the alienation experienced at liminal hotel spaces and which lead to new poetics of space, Vicki Baum, Georg Lukács, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bishop explore the socio-political and cultural conflicts which are manifested in and by the hotel. This volume invites us to think of “hotel modernisms” as situated in or enabled by this dynamic space. Including chapters which traverse the boundaries of nation and class, it regards the hotel as the transcultural space of modernity par excellence.

Download or read book Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism written by Martin Lockerd and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

Download or read book A Companion to Hemingway s Death in the Afternoon written by Miriam B. Mandel and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2009 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New, carefully focused essays providing a thorough examination of Hemingway's groundbreaking non-fictional work. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of theSpanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied the attention that his novels and short stories have enjoyed, a state of affairs this Companion seeks to remedy, breaking new ground by applying theoretical and critical approaches to a work of nonfiction. It does so in original essays that offer a thorough, balanced examination of a complex, boundary-breaking, and hitherto neglected text. The volume is broken into sections dealing with: the composition, reception, and sources of Death in the Afternoon; cultural translation, cultural criticism, semiotics, and paratextual matters; and the issues of art, authorship, audience, and the literary legacy of Death in the Afternoon. The contributors to the volume, four men and seven women, lay to rest the stereotype of Hemingway as a macho writer whom women do not read; and their nationalities (British, Spanish, American, and Israeli) indicate that Death in the Afternoon, even as it focuses on a particular national art, discusses matters of universal concern. Contributors: Miriam B. Mandel, Robert W. Trogdon, Lisa Tyler, Linda Wagner-Martin, Peter Messent, Beatriz Penas Ibáñez, Anthony Brand, Nancy Bredendick, Hilary Justice, Amy Vondrak, and Keneth Kinnamon. MiriamB. Mandel teaches in the English Department of Tel Aviv University.

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 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 From Schlemiel to Sabra written by Philip Hollander and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From Schlemiel to Sabra Philip Hollander examines how masculine ideals and images of the New Hebrew man shaped the Israeli state. In this innovative book, Hollander uncovers the complex relationship that Jews had with masculinity, interrogating narratives depicting masculinity in the new state as a transition from weak, feminized schlemiels to robust, muscular, and rugged Israelis. Turning to key literary texts by S. Y. Agnon, Y. H. Brenner, L. A. Arieli, and Aharon Reuveni, Hollander reveals how gender and sexuality were intertwined to promote a specific Zionist political agenda. A Zionist masculinity grounded in military prowess could not only protect the new state but also ensure its procreative needs and future. Self-awareness, physical power, fierce loyalty to the state and devotion to the land, humility, and nurture of the young were essential qualities that needed to be cultivated in migrants to the state. By turning to the early literature of Zionist Palestine, Hollander shows how Jews strove to construct a better Jewish future.

Download or read book The 2012 Story written by John Major Jenkins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On December 21, 2012, the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, a 5,125-year cycle calendar system pioneered by the Maya, will come to an end. At the same time, the earth, the sun, and the center of the galaxy will come together in an extremely rare cosmic alignment. More and more people believe that the world as we know it will experience a transformation in 2012, but few are aware of the complete history or significance of the date. John Major Jenkins, among the most authoritative voices of the 2012 movement, has written a definitive explanation of one of the most thought-provoking phenomena of our time. Drawing from his own groundbreaking research (including his involvement in the modern reconstruction of Mayan 2012 cosmology) and more than two decades of extensive study of Mayan culture, Jenkins has created the crucial guide to understanding the story of 2012—an essential overview of the history, theory, cultures, and personalities that have brought this extraordinary idea into modern awareness. Jenkins provides illuminating answers to some of the most-asked questions about 2012, including: - How did the early Maya devise the calendar that gives us the cycle ending in 2012, and how does it work? - How did the calendar come to be rediscovered and reconstructed in our era? - What controversies and intrigues surround the topic, and what do scholars and researchers have to say about them? - How can we cut through all the noise about 2012 and gain true wisdom from the Mayan teachings about this moment?