Author: Guri Barstad
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443858390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
States of Decadence is a two volume anthology that focuses on the literary and cultural phenomenon of decadence. Particular attention is given to literature from the end of the 1800s, the fin de siècle; however, the essays presented here are not restricted to this historical period, but draw lines both back in time and forward to our day to illuminate the contradictory multiplicity inherent in decadence. Furthermore, the essays go beyond literary studies, drawing on a number of the tropes and themes of decadence manifested in the arts and culture, such as in music, opera, film, history, and even jewelry design.
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.
Author: Eric Jerome Dickey
Publisher: Dutton
ISBN: 0451466527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
"What Nia Simone Bijou desires, she works hard to achieve. Her accomplishments as a respected writer have not only brought her to Hollywood, but she's now poised for worldwide success, and pursued and desired by Prada, a man of international power and wealth. With everything Nia has, she remains restless and on a journey to quell her inner storm. Then someone introduces her to a place called Decadence ..."--Page [4] cover.
Author: Brian M. Stableford
Publisher: Hippocrene Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
A black feast with offerings from the major practitioners and their precursors in France and England.
Author: Otto M. Urban
Publisher: Artefakt/Arbor Vitae
ISBN: 9788087164600
Category : Decadence in art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Decadence Now!: Visions of Excessupdates the androgyny, druggy velvet glamour, individualist dandyism and gothic decay of nineteenth-century Decadence for our times. Here, Decadence is envisioned as a response to apocalypse, economic turmoil and the effects of late capitalism. Decadence Now!: Visions of Excessreaches back to the 1970s to examine pre-millennial rumblings of alienation, aestheticism, morbidity, pornography, intoxication and madness in the art of Nobuyoshi Araki, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and considers more recent works by Matthew Barney, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gilbert and George, Keith Haring, Gottfried Helnwein, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Yasumasa Morimura, Catherine Opie, Zhang Peng, Pierre et Gilles, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin, David Wojnarowicz and many others. These works are assessed under thematic chapters: "Excess of the Self: Pain"; "Excess of the Body: Sex"; "Excess of Beauty: Pop"; and "Excess of Life: Death." Curator Otto M. Urban maps the Decadent tendency project through visual art, philosophy and literature.
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.
Author: Richard Sexton
Publisher: Schiffer + ORM
ISBN: 150730322X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
Second edition offers a look into the soulful homes and gardens of 1990s NOLA creatives, updated with a new layout, larger photos, and a narrative that includes the city's recent history For everyone who fantasizes about interiors that evoke an artistic world of color, myth, and romance The first edition sold more copies (90,000-plus) than any other photographic book about New Orleans in the city’s history
Author: Ellis Hanson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674194441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 426
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Book Description
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.
Author: Charles Bernheimer
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801867408
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
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.
Author: Peter Higbie Van Ness
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791412053
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 364
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Book Description
This book presents a philosophical rethinking of the meaning and nature of spiritual discipline. It offers a new way of describing and justifying practices like praying, meditating, fasting, and yoga, and it provides an innovative case for their contemporary importance. Spiritual discipline is especially effective at combatting Pascalian diversion, the pursuit of activities that occupy the mind just enough to avoid thinking about important things; and Nietzschean decadence, the proclivity for extirpating instinctive drives instead of satisfying or sublimating them. In addition to overcoming diversion and decadence in contemporary consumerist culture, VanNess recommends spiritual discipline as a means of political resistance to powerful institutions which seek to exercise social control in democratic societies by promulgating addictive patterns of consumption. Finally, he argues that regimens of spiritual discipline can serve healthful and liberating purposes, and generally promote fullness of life, only insofar as they are shaped by an ethos of intellectual criticism and aesthetic experimentation.
