Decadence in the Age of Modernism

Decadence in the Age of Modernism PDF Author: Kate Hext
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 142142942X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
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

Decadence in the Age of Modernism

Decadence in the Age of Modernism PDF Author: Kate Hext
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 142142942X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

Decadent Orientalisms

Decadent Orientalisms PDF Author: David Fieni
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823286409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

The Jewish Decadence

The Jewish Decadence PDF Author: Jonathan Freedman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022658108X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
"Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--

The Decadent Society

The Decadent Society PDF Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476785252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our wealthy, successful society has passed into an age of gridlock, stalemate, public failure and private despair. 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.

Editing Modernity

Editing Modernity PDF Author: Dean Jay Irvine
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802092713
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Based on extensive new archival and literary historical research, Editing Modernity examines these Canadian women writers and editors and their role in the production and dissemination of modernist and leftist little magazines.

Decadent Modernity

Decadent Modernity PDF Author: Michela Coletta
Publisher:
ISBN: 1786941317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies - Argentina, Uruguay and Chile - the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. It takes a transnational approach to show how civilisational constructs were adopted and adapted in a postcolonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernisation. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of 'Latin America' became gradually established in the region.

Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers

Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers PDF Author: Mariana Gray de Castro
Publisher: Tamesis Books
ISBN: 1855662566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Eighteen short essays by the most distinguished international scholars examine Pessoa's influences, his dialogues with other writers and artistic movements, and the responses his work has generated worldwide. Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa claimed that he did not evolve, but rather travelled. This book provides a state of the art panorama of Pessoa's literary travels, particularly in the English-speaking world. Its eighteen short, jargon-free essays were written by the most distinguished Pessoa scholars across the globe. They explore the influence on Pessoa's thinking of such writers as Whitman and Shakespeare, as well as his creative dialogues with figuresranging from decadent poets to the dark magician Aleister Crowley, and, finally, some of the ways in which he in turn has influenced others. They examine many different aspects of Pessoa's work, ranging from the poetry of the heteronyms to the haunting prose of The Book of Disquiet, from esoteric writings to personal letters, from reading notes to unpublished texts. Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers is a valuable introduction to this multifaceted modern master, intended for both students of modern literature and general readers interested in one of its major figures.

Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism PDF Author: Martin Lockerd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1350137650
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
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.

Five Faces of Modernity

Five Faces of Modernity PDF Author: Matei Călinescu
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822307679
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
This ambitious and illuminating book offers an analysis of nothing less than the aesthetic and intellectual ideas which have governed literary production during the past 150 years.

Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism

Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism PDF Author: Brian Pines
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501339168
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.