The Decadent Reader PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download The Decadent Reader PDF full book. Access full book title The Decadent Reader by Asti Hustvedt. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Asti Hustvedt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1104
Get Book
Book Description
A collection of stories and novels from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, decay, and deviance.In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-si cle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mend s, Rachilde, Jean Mor as, Octave Mirbeau, Jos phin P ladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-si cle France.
Author: Asti Hustvedt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1104
Get Book
Book Description
A collection of stories and novels from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, decay, and deviance.In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-si cle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-si cle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mend s, Rachilde, Jean Mor as, Octave Mirbeau, Jos phin P ladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-si cle France.
Author: Ross Douthat
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1476785252
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book
Book Description
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.
Author: Stephen Romer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191645818
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book
Book Description
'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.' A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Author: Eric Jerome Dickey
Publisher: Dutton
ISBN: 0451466527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 514
Get Book
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: Medlar Lucan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781873982822
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
Book Description
This book looks at the role in gardening played by torture, eroticism, blasphemy, the grotesque, narcotics, the artificial, and many other subjects dear to the decadent's heart.
Author: George C. Schoolfield
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300047142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Get Book
Book Description
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.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780712356633
Category : Decadence (Literary movement)
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book
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.
Author: Tawny Taylor
Publisher: Aphrodisia
ISBN: 075825721X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book
Book Description
Three sinfully sexy vampires. One very willing woman. Get ready for. . . Maximum Pleasure A closed door swings open. . .and Wynne Fischer enters an elegant bondage club for those who crave extremes of forbidden sensation. Within the walls of Twilight, ultra-male temptation comes in threes: the muscular brothers Rolf and Dierk, and the mysterious Master Zane. Dominance is in their blood and the natural submissiveness of the inexperienced Wynne arouses the men beyond belief. Baring herself body and soul at their command, their captive is about to satisfy her most hidden desires as she explores the dark side of sexual passion. . . Praise for Tawny Taylor "Absolutely delicious!" --Kate Douglas on Dark Master "Halloween will never be the same after this fun read!" --L.A. Banks on Sex And The Single Ghost
Author: Simon Heffer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643136712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 912
Get Book
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: Matthew Potolsky
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book
Book Description
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.
