Dreamers of Decadence PDF Download

Author: Ian Fletcher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

View

Book Description

Author: Philippe Jullian
Publisher: Conran Octopus
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282

View

Book Description

Author: Murray Pittock
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415077576
Category : Decadence (Literary movement)
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description

Author: Matthew Sturgis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781843680734
Category : Decadence (Literary movement)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
The Eighteen Nineties have become legendary: the period of Wilde, Beardsley and the Yellow Book; a decadent twilight at the close of the Victorian century, when young poets--weary of life--sat about drinking absinthe and talking of strange sins. The provenance of this beguiling picture is peculiar, for the myth of the Decadent Nineties was created during the period itself. It was an age of artistic self-consciousness, during which writers and painters believed that they had to create not only their works but also their personalities. In Passionate Attitudes, Matthew Sturgis examines the varying extents to which ambitious poets, penurious painters, canny publishers and a controversialist press all conspired to promote the notion of decadence. He explores in detail the cataclysmic effect upon English decadence of the spectacular trial and subsequent conviction of Wilde in 1895, a fall which was to cast a blight over the whole generation. As well as the luminaries Wilde, Beardsley and Beerbohm, Sturgis portrays Arthur Symons, the poet of the music halls, who divided his energies between promoting Verlaine and chasing after chorus girls; Ernest Dowson, the demoralized romantic of the Rhymers Club; Count Erik Stenbock, who kept a snake up his sleeve and went mad; and John Gray, who may have been the model for Wilde's Dorian. John Lane published most of their books; Owen Seaman and Ada Leverson parodied their manners. Elegantly written, Passionate Attitudes provides a hugely informative and richly entertaining account of the zeitgeist behind the glorious decade of excess.

Author: Matthew Sturgis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

View

Book Description

Author: David Weir
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 079147917X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258

View

Book Description
Decadent Culture in the United States traces the development of the decadent movement in America from its beginnings in the 1890s to its brief revival in the 1920s. During the fin de siècle, many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline since the frontier had ended and the country's "manifest destiny" seemed to be fulfilled. Decadence—the cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy so familiar in nineteenth-century Europe—was thus taken up by groups of artists and writers in major American cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Noting that the capitalist, commercial context of America provided possibilities for the entrance of decadence into popular culture to a degree that simply did not occur in Europe, David Weir argues that American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons. By going against the grain of dominant social and cultural trends, American writers produced a native variant of Continental Decadence that eventually dissipated "upward" into the rising leisure class and "downward" into popular, commercial culture.

Author: Murray Pittock
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317629531
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

View

Book Description
The 1890s, the Naughty Nineties, was an exciting and flamboyant time in British life and literature. First published in 1993, this title traces the genesis of the literary culture of the 1890s through some of the popular novels and literary texts of the period. By examining works by such writers as Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, W. B. Yeats, and Walter Pater, Murray Pittock analyses the nature of the ‘Decadent era’ and the artistic theories of Symbolism and Aestheticism. Significantly, he provides a full assessment of the lasting impact that the thought of the period has had on our own understanding of our cultural past. Spectrum of Decadence explores the confrontations between art and science, sex and mortality, desire and virtue, which, the author argues are as much a part of modern society’s fin-de-siécle as they were of the nineteenth century’s. This reissue bridges the gap between literary texts, historical context, and contemporary critical theory.

Author: Nicolette Gable (Ph.D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decadence in art
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
This dissertation engages with a neglected group of writers, artists, and intellectuals in the United States who identified with Decadence, a European literary and artistic movement. Decadence was a label, embraced by some, that refers to a state of art and literature that suggests the end of an Empire: luxurious, imitative, corrupt, sensuous, and ultimately worthless. Self-professed Decadents elevated artificiality, morbidity, sensuality, and pessimism. They also lived lives, both imaginary and real, of separation from the world, attempting to fully embody otherness as they watched the world change around them and anticipated the fall of civilization. I question how these supposedly foreign ideas worked in America, in a transatlantic conversation that reveals yet another aspect of the transition to modernity in America. I suggest morbid love as key to understanding the cultural work of Decadence, using it to mean both a love of illness and disease that the Decadents evidenced, as well as a love that in itself was doomed to death. In this dissertation I argue the following. First, I build on work establishing the existence of American Decadence by emphasizing the cultural engagement of Decadence despite its self-professed insularity and rarity. Second, I argue that Decadence in America exemplifies a particular moment in the intellectual histories of degeneration theory and sexuality that has been largely ignored. While most studies of degeneration theory emphasize the power of the theorists and the low social status of theorized, Decadents brought degeneration to the upper classes, the learned, those with cultural capital. They acted as both theorists and theorized. In terms of sexuality, Decadence created a space that fit into neither the standard acts paradigm, nor the following identity paradigm, suggesting that sexuality was a matter of artistic and aesthetic choice and taste. Third, I argue that these deviations from standard narratives show that American Decadents performed a political queerness that functioned as a cultural critique and created a space that complicates our understanding of the period. Each chapter of this dissertation explores an aspect of the Decadent cultural criticism, emphasizing the deliberate queerness, or morbidity as they would phrase it, of their stance. It is now standard in studies of structures to examine the construction of the normative condition (whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, etc.) rather than the deviant. I argue, however, that this approach automatically associates those with power as normative and those without as deviant. I hope in this work to complicate that narrative.

Author: Brian M. Stableford
Publisher: Hippocrene Books
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

View

Book Description
A black feast with offerings from the major practitioners and their precursors in France and England.

Author: Philippe Jullian
Publisher: New York : Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Art nouveau
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
Many of these artists - Moreau; Toorop, the brilliant half-Balinese, half-Dutch painter and draftsman; the French Odilon Redon, the great master of Symbolist art; the Viennese Klimt; and the Belgian Khnopff --