Description
Book SynopsisThe first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on t
Trade ReviewDecadence in the Age of Modernism will be of great import for scholars concerned with Decadent art and literature and would work well as a required text for graduate seminars on Decadent literature and visual and material culture.
—Julia Skelly, McGill University,
Victorian StudiesDecadence in the Age of Modernism provides essential reading for decadence studies, continues a necessary intervention in modernist studies, and suggests important changes to twentieth-century literature surveys.
—Robert Stiling, Florida State University,
Nineteenth-Century ContextsThis book vividly demonstrates the value of bridging the fields of Victorian, Modernist, and Harlem Renaissance studies.
—Mimi Winick,
The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite StudiesOn the whole,
Decadence in the Age of Modernism is a considerable accomplishment that offers much to discover.
—
The Modernist ReviewThis collection of essays offers a series of fascinating examples that illuminate the nuances of this relationship and, crucially, collectively draw attention to the plurality of both traditions in a period too often dominated by the high modernist canon.
—Natasha Ryan, University of Oxford,
Decadence and CinemaDecadence in the Age of Modernism is an illuminating and ground-breaking consideration of an under-examined subject, one that ably demonstrates that the fin not only outlived the siècle, it thrived in a new century.
—Richard A. Kaye,
Modernism/Modernity...distinguished and exceptional.
—Robert Finnigan, Nottingham Trent University,
VictoriographiesTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Kate Hext and Alex Murray
1. Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism
Kristin Mahoney
2. The Ugly Things of Salome
Ellen Crowell
3. Decadent Paths and Percolations after 1895
Nick Freeman
4. "A Poetess of No Mean Order": Margaret Sackville, Women's Poetry, and the Legacy of Aestheticism
Joseph Bristow
5. The Queer Drift of Firbank
Ellis Hanson
6. Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Decadence
Sarah Parker
7. Woolf and Joyce, Barnes and Beckett: The Legacy of Decadence in Major Modernist Novels
Vincent Sherry
8. "The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan's": Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism
Howard J. Booth
9. The Naughtiness of the Avant-Garde: Donald Evans, Claire Marie, and Tender Buttons
Douglas Mao
10. The Queerness of Being 1890 in 1922: Carl Van Vechten and the New Decadence
Kirsten MacLeod
11. A Decadent Dream Deferred: Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance's Queer Modernity
Michèle Mendelssohn
Contributors
Index
