Fictions of British Decadence

Fictions of British Decadence PDF Author: Kirsten MacLeod
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230504000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Fictions of British Decadence

Fictions of British Decadence PDF Author: Kirsten MacLeod
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230504000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author: Alex Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108658598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
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.

The Age of Decadence

The Age of Decadence PDF Author: Simon Heffer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643136712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 788

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Book Description
A richly detailed history of Britain at its imperial zenith, revealing the simmering tensions and explosive rivalries beneath the opulent surface of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The popular memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly, and thriving country. Britain commanded a vast empire: she bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamed of and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence can be seen in Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation, and London’s great Edwardian palaces. Yet beneath the surface things were very different In The Age of Decadence, Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis—and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press, and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the nostalgia of A. E. Housman.

Fictions of British Decadence

Fictions of British Decadence PDF Author: Kirsten MacLeod
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403999085
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

The Shape of Fear

The Shape of Fear PDF Author: Susan Jennifer Navarette
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813147948
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Walter Pater and others changed the nature of thought concerning the human body and the physical environment that had shaped it. In response, the 1890s saw the publication of a series of remarkable literary works that had their genesis in the intense scientific and aesthetic activity of those preceding decades—texts that emphasized themes of degeneration and were themselves stylistically decompositive, with language both a surrogate for physical deformity and a source of anxiety. Susan J. Navarette examines the ways in which scientific and cultural concerns of late nineteenth-century England are coded in the horror literature of the period. By contextualizing the structural, stylistic, and thematic systems developed by writers seeking to reenact textually the entropic forces they perceived in the natural world, Navarette reconstructs the late Victorian mentalité. She analyzes aesthetic responses to trends in contemporary science and explores horror writers' use of scientific methodologies to support their perception that a long-awaited period of cultural decline had begun. In her analysis of the classics Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, Navarette shows how James and Conrad made artistic use of earlier "scientific" readings of the body. She also considers works by lesser-known authors Walter de la Mare, Vernon Lee, and Arthur Machen, who produced fin de siècle stories that took the form of "hybrid literary monstrosities." To underscore the fascination with bodily decay and deformation that these writers explored, The Shape of Fear is enhanced with prints and line drawings by Victor Hugo, James Ensor, and other artists of the day. This elegantly written book formulates a new canon of late Victorian fiction that will intrigue scholars of literature and cultural history.

Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914

Decadent Romanticism: 1780-1914 PDF Author: Kostas Boyiopoulos
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317154118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture

Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture PDF Author: Jonathan Stone
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030344525
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s rewrites the story of early modernist literature and culture by drawing out the tensions underlying its simultaneous engagement with Decadence and Symbolism, the unsustainable combination of this world and the other. With a broadly framed literary and cultural approach, Jonathan Stone examines a shift in perspective that explodes the notion of reality and showcases the uneasy relationship between the tangible and intangible aspects of the surrounding world. Modernism quenches a growing fascination with the ephemeral and that which cannot be seen while also doubling down on the significance of the material world and finding profound meaning in the physical and the corporeal. Decadence and Symbolism complement the broader historical trajectory of the fin de siècle by affirming the novelty of a modernist mindset and offering an alternative to the empirical and positivistic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Stone seeks to recreate a significant historical and cultural moment in the development of modernity, a moment that embraces the concept of Decadence while repurposing its aesthetic and social import to help navigate the fundamental changes that accompanied the dawn of the twentieth century.

Calvary a Novel

Calvary a Novel PDF Author: Octave Mirbeau
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 9360460591
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
"Calvary" is an effective novel written by way of French Writer Octave Mirbeau. The narrative is a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and ethical corruption that permeate society, especially focusing on the Catholic Church and the French bourgeoisie. The tale unfolds via the eyes of the protagonist, Father Serge Mouret, a young priest whose idealism clashes with the oppressive forces within the church. Set in the provincial metropolis of Artaud, "Calvary" follows Father Mouret's religious adventure as he grapples with the enticements and sins that surround him. The novel explores themes of spiritual fervor, sexual repression, and the darkish underbelly of institutionalized religion. Father Mouret's inner struggles and the hypocrisy of those around him serve as a lens via which Mirbeau exposes the ethical decay within both the clergy and society at huge. Mirbeau employs brilliant and regularly surprising imagery to depict the corruption and decadence that exist under the veneer of spiritual sanctity. "Calvary" stands as a critique of the oppressive nature of non-secular establishments and societal norms, supplying a provocative and unsettling portrayal of the human circumstance. Mirbeau's paintings is a seminal piece of French literature that demanding situations conventional morality and exposes the contradictions inherent inside the pursuit of virtue.

Decadence

Decadence PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780712356633
Category : Decadence (Literary movement)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Decadent literature in Britain blossomed in the 1890s around such figures as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons. Under the maxim 'Art for Art's Sake' they often defied moral convention and pursued the limits of sensation, wilfully transgressing Victorian respectability along the way. This illustrated anthology concentrates on the major preoccupations of Decadence: Artifice, Intoxication, Spirituality, and Death. The selections include not only the finest examples of Decadent prose and poetry, but also extracts from theoretical texts, criticism and parody. This wider focus creates a well-rounded and distinctive introduction to the best of Decadent writing.

Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898

Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898 PDF Author: L. Rotunno
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137323809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.