Katharine Ellis
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- September 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195365856
- eISBN:
- 9780199867738
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195365856.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This concluding chapter takes in the entire century, highlighting continuities and disjunctions, repertorial patterns, absences, and disappearances. It addresses the ways in which early music's ...
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This concluding chapter takes in the entire century, highlighting continuities and disjunctions, repertorial patterns, absences, and disappearances. It addresses the ways in which early music's increasing normality related to aesthetic conservatism after around 1840, discusses the reasons for certain works' totemic allure, cautions against the rigid association of certain aesthetic choices with particular political persuasions, and foregrounds pervasive feelings of French musical decadence as a driving force for revivalism of both French and foreign music. Paradoxically, after decades of disdain, French Baroque dance and keyboard music — low-status “feminine” repertories — became the focus for turn-of-the-century composers writing explicitly “French” music, while Bach became a “universal” reference point. Finally, the book returns to its opening (Le Vieux Paris, 1900), broadening to address the general question of what revivalism can tell us about the ideological premises that underpin cultural life.Less
This concluding chapter takes in the entire century, highlighting continuities and disjunctions, repertorial patterns, absences, and disappearances. It addresses the ways in which early music's increasing normality related to aesthetic conservatism after around 1840, discusses the reasons for certain works' totemic allure, cautions against the rigid association of certain aesthetic choices with particular political persuasions, and foregrounds pervasive feelings of French musical decadence as a driving force for revivalism of both French and foreign music. Paradoxically, after decades of disdain, French Baroque dance and keyboard music — low-status “feminine” repertories — became the focus for turn-of-the-century composers writing explicitly “French” music, while Bach became a “universal” reference point. Finally, the book returns to its opening (Le Vieux Paris, 1900), broadening to address the general question of what revivalism can tell us about the ideological premises that underpin cultural life.
Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691151762
- eISBN:
- 9781400842599
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691151762.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
This chapter examines how despite the historical influences of vegetarian Vaishnava traditions, Jainism, the salience of Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat, and its current index of the abject, meat eating is ...
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This chapter examines how despite the historical influences of vegetarian Vaishnava traditions, Jainism, the salience of Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat, and its current index of the abject, meat eating is not simply associated with disgust. It also carries great potency, and can signify power. If meat eating was on the one hand identified with vice and with groups considered backward, it could alternatively also be associated with erotic attraction and an alluring potency, modern decadence, and cosmopolitan freedom—an association gaining ground especially among the young. The dual valence of meat is acutely present in how members of lower-caste groups explain, legitimize, and rationalize their own practices of meat consumption or abstention.Less
This chapter examines how despite the historical influences of vegetarian Vaishnava traditions, Jainism, the salience of Mahatma Gandhi in Gujarat, and its current index of the abject, meat eating is not simply associated with disgust. It also carries great potency, and can signify power. If meat eating was on the one hand identified with vice and with groups considered backward, it could alternatively also be associated with erotic attraction and an alluring potency, modern decadence, and cosmopolitan freedom—an association gaining ground especially among the young. The dual valence of meat is acutely present in how members of lower-caste groups explain, legitimize, and rationalize their own practices of meat consumption or abstention.
Max Saunders
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199579761
- eISBN:
- 9780191722882
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579761.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in ...
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This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.Less
This chapter suggests a new reading of one of Pound's most contested works in terms of the contexts provided in Part I. In particular, Pound's parody of aestheticism is compared to Beerbohm's in Seven Men. The critical tradition has been excessively preoccupied with trying to identify the speakers and ‘originals’ of each section of Mauberley. It argues that, seen in relation to the growing interest in portrait collections, composite portraiture, the disturbances in auto/biography, and imaginary art‐works, this poem sequence can be read as a parody of the forms of literary memoir, through which Pound also explores autobiography.
Thomas F. Haddox
- Published in print:
- 2005
- Published Online:
- March 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823225217
- eISBN:
- 9780823236947
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fso/9780823225217.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate ...
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This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.Less
This book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Margaret Mitchell, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and John Kennedy Toole. It shows that Catholicism and its Church have always been a presence, albeit in different ways, in the southern cultural tradition. For some, Catholicism has been associated with miscegenation and with the political aspirations of African Americans; for others, it has served as the model for the feudal and patriarchal society that some southern whites sought to establish; for still others, it has presented a gorgeous aesthetic spectacle associated with decadence and homoeroticism; and for still others, it has marked a quotidian, do-it-yourself “lifestyle” attractive for its lack of concern with southern anxieties about honor. By focusing on the shifting and contradictory ways Catholicism has signified within southern literature and culture, this book contributes to a more nuanced understanding of American and southern literary and cultural history.
James Watt
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199554157
- eISBN:
- 9780191720437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199554157.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, 18th-century Literature
Beckford's Vathek (1786) is indebted both to the oriental pastiches of Anthony Hamilton and to the orientalist scholarship of Barthelemy D'Herbelot. This chapter begins by examining the generic and ...
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Beckford's Vathek (1786) is indebted both to the oriental pastiches of Anthony Hamilton and to the orientalist scholarship of Barthelemy D'Herbelot. This chapter begins by examining the generic and tonal heterogeneity of Vathek, via a detailed focus on its critical reception, and on the relations between Beckford and his editor Samuel Henley. By seizing on the historical figure of Vathek, Beckford made possible different allegorical interpretations of his work, allowing readers to see his protagonist as, among other things, an exemplification of imperial decadence. But in interweaving different registers of detail, culturally specific and outlandishly absurd, Beckford also took the language of Orientalist fantasy to a point of near-collapse, ironizing any such solemn constructions of his work. Reading Vathek in the context of the Nights’ contemporary reception, the chapter concludes by suggesting that Beckford sought to keep alive a form of literary invention that would remain non-accountable, beyond critical and editorial regulation.Less
Beckford's Vathek (1786) is indebted both to the oriental pastiches of Anthony Hamilton and to the orientalist scholarship of Barthelemy D'Herbelot. This chapter begins by examining the generic and tonal heterogeneity of Vathek, via a detailed focus on its critical reception, and on the relations between Beckford and his editor Samuel Henley. By seizing on the historical figure of Vathek, Beckford made possible different allegorical interpretations of his work, allowing readers to see his protagonist as, among other things, an exemplification of imperial decadence. But in interweaving different registers of detail, culturally specific and outlandishly absurd, Beckford also took the language of Orientalist fantasy to a point of near-collapse, ironizing any such solemn constructions of his work. Reading Vathek in the context of the Nights’ contemporary reception, the chapter concludes by suggesting that Beckford sought to keep alive a form of literary invention that would remain non-accountable, beyond critical and editorial regulation.
Michela Coletta
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781786941312
- eISBN:
- 9781789629040
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786941312.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Latin American History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Koenraad Claes
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474426213
- eISBN:
- 9781474453776
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474426213.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new ...
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Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated design project or ‘Total Works of Art’ in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen little magazines of the Victorian Fin de Siècle, situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative content items. In doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.Less
Fed up with the commercial and moral restrictions of the mainstream press of the late Victorian era, the diverse avant-garde groups of authors and artists of the Aesthetic Movement developed a new genre of periodicals in which to propagate their principles and circulate their work. Such periodicals are known as ‘little magazines’ for their small-scale production and their circulation among limited audiences, and during the late Victorian period they were often conceptualized as integrated design project or ‘Total Works of Art’ in order to visually and materially represent the ideals of their producers. Little magazines like the Pre-Raphaelite Germ, the Arts & Crafts Hobby Horse and the Decadent Yellow Book launched the careers of innovative authors and artists and provided a site for debate between minor contributors and visiting grandees from Matthew Arnold to Oscar Wilde. This book offers detailed discussions of the background to thirteen little magazines of the Victorian Fin de Siècle, situating these within the periodical press of their day and providing interpretations of representative content items. In doing so, it outlines the earliest history of this enduring publication genre, and of the Aesthetic Movement that developed along with it.
Peter Jeffreys
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801447082
- eISBN:
- 9781501701252
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801447082.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young C. P. Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the ...
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During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young C. P. Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Edward Burne-Jones and James McNeill Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. This book returns to this critical period of Cavafy's life, showing the poet's creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. It offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy's relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy's view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater's imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. The book concludes by considering Cavafy's current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.Less
During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young C. P. Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Edward Burne-Jones and James McNeill Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. This book returns to this critical period of Cavafy's life, showing the poet's creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. It offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy's relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy's view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater's imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. The book concludes by considering Cavafy's current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.
James H. Murphy
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199596997
- eISBN:
- 9780191723520
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596997.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture ...
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The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.Less
The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.
Kostas Boyiopoulos
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748690923
- eISBN:
- 9781474412377
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748690923.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in ...
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This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in Decadence by examining, together for the first time, the work of three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. In its overarching argument the book highlights an exasperating yet productive paradox that lies at the heart of Decadent poetics. On the one hand Decadence venerates the inaccessible, representational realm of artificiality; on the other hand it relishes sensuous experience in its immediacy as it is advocated by Walter Pater. This paradox is expressed in erotic encounters with statues, ‘soulless’ women, fetishes, landscapes, dead bodies, and texts. These encounters, the book suggests, develop in three stages: Wilde’s early and middle period poetry showcases the sensuality circumscribed in the frozen surface of art. With Symons the erotic encounter with artificiality reaches its apex as it is elevated to a fragmented, urban experience. In Dowson, through images of death, isolation and exhaustion, these encounters remain unrealised tragic possibilities. The book sees these Decadent poems as sites where the self, in the context of transgression, tends to become sensually immersed in and with their art and artifice. Aesthetic appreciation turns into Decadent participation in a foredoomed erotic experience ultimately with the very texture of language itself.Less
This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in Decadence by examining, together for the first time, the work of three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. In its overarching argument the book highlights an exasperating yet productive paradox that lies at the heart of Decadent poetics. On the one hand Decadence venerates the inaccessible, representational realm of artificiality; on the other hand it relishes sensuous experience in its immediacy as it is advocated by Walter Pater. This paradox is expressed in erotic encounters with statues, ‘soulless’ women, fetishes, landscapes, dead bodies, and texts. These encounters, the book suggests, develop in three stages: Wilde’s early and middle period poetry showcases the sensuality circumscribed in the frozen surface of art. With Symons the erotic encounter with artificiality reaches its apex as it is elevated to a fragmented, urban experience. In Dowson, through images of death, isolation and exhaustion, these encounters remain unrealised tragic possibilities. The book sees these Decadent poems as sites where the self, in the context of transgression, tends to become sensually immersed in and with their art and artifice. Aesthetic appreciation turns into Decadent participation in a foredoomed erotic experience ultimately with the very texture of language itself.
Roger Keys
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198151609
- eISBN:
- 9780191672767
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198151609.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
Decadence, Neo-romanticism, Symbolism, Modernism, and the Silver Age are some of the commoner designations of the period which followed the flowering of the Realist novel in Russia. This chapter ...
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Decadence, Neo-romanticism, Symbolism, Modernism, and the Silver Age are some of the commoner designations of the period which followed the flowering of the Realist novel in Russia. This chapter proposes to dispense with the words ‘symbolist’ or ‘symbolic’ as a means of designating similarity or dissimilarity in type or function between works written during this period. Instead, it uses the word ‘modernist’ to denote those distinctive and novel qualities held in common by a substantial group of works written during the period. It also describes the significance of the term ‘Silver Age’ and its success in Russia as a convenient way of designating and rehabilitating the non-realistic art produced during the period from the 1890s to the 1920s.Less
Decadence, Neo-romanticism, Symbolism, Modernism, and the Silver Age are some of the commoner designations of the period which followed the flowering of the Realist novel in Russia. This chapter proposes to dispense with the words ‘symbolist’ or ‘symbolic’ as a means of designating similarity or dissimilarity in type or function between works written during this period. Instead, it uses the word ‘modernist’ to denote those distinctive and novel qualities held in common by a substantial group of works written during the period. It also describes the significance of the term ‘Silver Age’ and its success in Russia as a convenient way of designating and rehabilitating the non-realistic art produced during the period from the 1890s to the 1920s.
Jonathan Wild
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748635061
- eISBN:
- 9781474419536
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748635061.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian ...
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This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H. G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity. These ‘departments’ — war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, children's literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England — offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, this book offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.Less
This book challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernism. The text investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H. G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity. These ‘departments’ — war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, children's literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England — offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, this book offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.
Jed Esty
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199857968
- eISBN:
- 9780199919581
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199857968.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter analyzes Wilde's Dorian Gray and Wells's Tono-Bungay as antidevelopmental novels that reveal, from the perspective of the metropole, the increasing displacement of national by global ...
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This chapter analyzes Wilde's Dorian Gray and Wells's Tono-Bungay as antidevelopmental novels that reveal, from the perspective of the metropole, the increasing displacement of national by global frames of reference for the British novel. Wilde and Wells embed the motif of broken Bildung in a wider story of the disjunction between capitalist dynamism (consumerist lust, rampant financial speculation, bottomless energy needs) and national tradition. Wilde's cosmopolitan decadence and Wells's global marketing give us what we might call the two faces of post-national narrative, rendered in terms of an overt crisis in the allegorization of the maturing soul linked to the modernizing society. In these two novels of endless youth, modern consumer culture fully penetrates the plot of socialization, unraveling the culture-commerce compromise of the classic bildungsroman with particular clarity and throwing overboard the heterosexual marriage plot as the presumed center of social reproduction.Less
This chapter analyzes Wilde's Dorian Gray and Wells's Tono-Bungay as antidevelopmental novels that reveal, from the perspective of the metropole, the increasing displacement of national by global frames of reference for the British novel. Wilde and Wells embed the motif of broken Bildung in a wider story of the disjunction between capitalist dynamism (consumerist lust, rampant financial speculation, bottomless energy needs) and national tradition. Wilde's cosmopolitan decadence and Wells's global marketing give us what we might call the two faces of post-national narrative, rendered in terms of an overt crisis in the allegorization of the maturing soul linked to the modernizing society. In these two novels of endless youth, modern consumer culture fully penetrates the plot of socialization, unraveling the culture-commerce compromise of the classic bildungsroman with particular clarity and throwing overboard the heterosexual marriage plot as the presumed center of social reproduction.
Simon Morrison
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520229433
- eISBN:
- 9780520927261
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520229433.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, this text is a treatment of the topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of ...
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An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, this text is a treatment of the topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the 19th century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, the book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. The book shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment. The book treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades; Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya; Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium; and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers a complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act.Less
An aesthetic, historical, and theoretical study of four scores, this text is a treatment of the topic of Russian opera in the Silver Age. Spanning the gap between the supernatural Russian music of the 19th century and the compositions of Prokofiev and Stravinsky, the book explores how Russian symbolist poets interpreted opera and prompted operatic innovation. The book shows how these works, though stylistically and technically different, reveal the extent to which the operatic representation of the miraculous can be translated into its enactment. The book treats these largely unstudied pieces by canonical composers: Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades; Rimsky-Korsakov's Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya; Scriabin's unfinished Mysterium; and Prokofiev's Fiery Angel. The chapters, revisionist studies of these composers and scores, address separate aspects of symbolist poetics, discussing such topics as literary and musical decadence, pagan-Christian syncretism, theurgy, and life creation, or the portrayal of art in life. The appendix offers a complete English-language translation of Scriabin's libretto for the Preparatory Act.
C. W. Thompson
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199233540
- eISBN:
- 9780191730948
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199233540.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
French Romantic novels and travelogues had helped each other to enrich description. Yet at their best, Nodier, Stendhal, Hugo, and Nerval showed that description was most effective when not allowed ...
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French Romantic novels and travelogues had helped each other to enrich description. Yet at their best, Nodier, Stendhal, Hugo, and Nerval showed that description was most effective when not allowed to dominate in narratives blending personal adventures and impressions with contemporary, historical, and legendary stories. After 1850, this balance would be upset as travelogues succumbed to the pressures for more precision and description exerted by positivism, photography, and other multiplying sources of information. The genre lost its way, becoming overwhelmed either by stories (late Dumas), or by description (late Gautier). However brilliant the descriptions of the latter's Italia (1852) and Constantinople (1853), the almost exclusive concern of such works with picturesque surfaces heralds the onset of a decadent strain that would culminate in the aesthetically titillating fin de siècle travelogues of Loti and Lorrain. The essential balance sought by the Romantics had more of a future, as foretold already by Fromentin.Less
French Romantic novels and travelogues had helped each other to enrich description. Yet at their best, Nodier, Stendhal, Hugo, and Nerval showed that description was most effective when not allowed to dominate in narratives blending personal adventures and impressions with contemporary, historical, and legendary stories. After 1850, this balance would be upset as travelogues succumbed to the pressures for more precision and description exerted by positivism, photography, and other multiplying sources of information. The genre lost its way, becoming overwhelmed either by stories (late Dumas), or by description (late Gautier). However brilliant the descriptions of the latter's Italia (1852) and Constantinople (1853), the almost exclusive concern of such works with picturesque surfaces heralds the onset of a decadent strain that would culminate in the aesthetically titillating fin de siècle travelogues of Loti and Lorrain. The essential balance sought by the Romantics had more of a future, as foretold already by Fromentin.
Ben Fisher
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780853239161
- eISBN:
- 9781846313721
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313721
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
This book is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, ...
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This book is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin–de–siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry's 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best–known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry's friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry's own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.Less
This book is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin–de–siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry's 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best–known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry's friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry's own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.
David Rollo
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226724614
- eISBN:
- 9780226724607
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226724607.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of ...
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Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God's order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality. At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. This book examines two such texts—Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose–-arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. The book concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue and Tale.Less
Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God's order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality. At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. This book examines two such texts—Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose–-arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. The book concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue and Tale.
Margaret Notley
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- October 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190069865
- eISBN:
- 9780190069896
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190069865.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ...
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The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ultimately determining the opera’s shape and tone. When Wedekind rewrote material from the Ur-Lulu as two supposedly self-sufficient plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, he responded in different ways to the threat of further censorship. The resulting discrepancies between the later plays, second order consequences of censorship, created obstacles to the joining of them that Berg and other dramaturges, beginning with Wedekind himself, would undertake. Berg worked to overcome the second order consequences by composing intricate leitmotivic connections between the opera’s halves, each based on one of the plays. Recognizing fundamental differences between the plays, this book seeks to recover some of the nuances in the plays and Berg’s treatment of them that have been obscured by assumptions of their unity. It also considers the contradiction between dramatic material that many spectators find sordid and the beauty of much of the music, in particular three musical passages that make a Liebestod effect, and traces this to differences between Wedekind and Berg. The artistic stance known as fin-de-siècle decadence was responsible for deliberately offensive features of the Ur-Lulu. Berg associated the Lulu character with the beauty of major-minor tonality, a musical system over-ripe and in that sense decadent at the turn of the century, in that way enabling a problematic symbolic reading of the also problematic misogynistic material.Less
The book takes censorship as an entry point into Berg’s Lulu. Beginning in 1894 with the suppression of the Ur-Lulu, Wedekind’s original play, responses to acts of censorship played a role in ultimately determining the opera’s shape and tone. When Wedekind rewrote material from the Ur-Lulu as two supposedly self-sufficient plays, Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora, he responded in different ways to the threat of further censorship. The resulting discrepancies between the later plays, second order consequences of censorship, created obstacles to the joining of them that Berg and other dramaturges, beginning with Wedekind himself, would undertake. Berg worked to overcome the second order consequences by composing intricate leitmotivic connections between the opera’s halves, each based on one of the plays. Recognizing fundamental differences between the plays, this book seeks to recover some of the nuances in the plays and Berg’s treatment of them that have been obscured by assumptions of their unity. It also considers the contradiction between dramatic material that many spectators find sordid and the beauty of much of the music, in particular three musical passages that make a Liebestod effect, and traces this to differences between Wedekind and Berg. The artistic stance known as fin-de-siècle decadence was responsible for deliberately offensive features of the Ur-Lulu. Berg associated the Lulu character with the beauty of major-minor tonality, a musical system over-ripe and in that sense decadent at the turn of the century, in that way enabling a problematic symbolic reading of the also problematic misogynistic material.
Laura Eastlake
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198833031
- eISBN:
- 9780191871351
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198833031.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, British and Irish History: BCE to 500CE
Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to ...
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Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. The Roman parallel was used to capture the martial virtue of Wellington just as it was used to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome for Victorian ideas about masculinity. With chapters on education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, it makes sense of the manifold and often contradictory representations of Rome—as distinct from Greece—in authors like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others.Less
Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity examines Victorian receptions of ancient Rome from the French Revolution to the First World War, with a specific focus on how those receptions were deployed to create useable models of masculinity. Romans in Victorian literature were at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire. The Roman parallel was used to capture the martial virtue of Wellington just as it was used to condemn the deviance and degeneracy of Oscar Wilde. Using approaches from literary and cultural studies, reception studies, and gender studies, this book is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of ancient Rome for Victorian ideas about masculinity. With chapters on education, politics, empire, and late Victorian decadence, it makes sense of the manifold and often contradictory representations of Rome—as distinct from Greece—in authors like Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and others.
Catherine Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198701750
- eISBN:
- 9780191771460
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198701750.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume ...
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A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume in Victorian literary culture. Perfume-associated notions of imaginative influence and identity are central to this study, which explores the unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature, concentrating on texts associated with aestheticism and decadence, but also noting important anticipations in Romantic poetry and prose, and earlier Victorian poetry and fiction. Throughout, literary analysis is informed by extensive reference to the historical and cultural context of Victorian perfume. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things such as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.Less
A major reconceptualization of the imagination that reinstates its hidden links with the historically neglected sense of smell, this book is the first to examine the role played by scent and perfume in Victorian literary culture. Perfume-associated notions of imaginative influence and identity are central to this study, which explores the unfamiliar scented world of Victorian literature, concentrating on texts associated with aestheticism and decadence, but also noting important anticipations in Romantic poetry and prose, and earlier Victorian poetry and fiction. Throughout, literary analysis is informed by extensive reference to the historical and cultural context of Victorian perfume. A key theme is the emergence of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André Raffalovich, Theodore Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different ways, signifying such diverse things such as style, atmosphere, influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement, individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.
