Description
Book SynopsisIn Reframing Decadence, Peter Jeffreys shows Cavafy's creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. In the process, Jeffreys offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy's relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence.
Trade Review"In this original and fascinating book, Cavafy emerges not as an isolated, aesthetically detached, and somewhat eccentric literary figure but as a deeply culturally engaged cosmopolitan writer. Peter Jeffreys, who seems to know more about Cavafy than any critic alive, shows how Cavafy's early stays in Britain and France gave him an intense foundation in an ongoing decadent tradition then emerging as a countercultural force in British and French writing, painting, and criticism. Reframing Decadence explores Cavafy's fitful journalistic and literary career, the museum and gallery works he would have undoubtedly encountered during his London sojourn, and the contemporary texts he might have read as an exile in Britain." -- Richard Kaye, Hunter College, author of
The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction"This book follows the long trajectory from Symbolist to Modernist poetics and erotics by placing C. P. Cavafy at the crossroads of French decadence and British aestheticism, Hellenic belatedness and Roman decline, Byzantine taste and Pre-Raphaelite art, colonialism and homosexuality, modern empire and Greek diaspora. Peter Jeffreys, the eminent Cavafy interpreter, editor, and translator, has written a superb biocritical study of impressive geographical, historical, and intermedial breadth on the role of the Author in high modernity. This is a landmark reading of a poet who has become nothing less than a strategy for the caring for the self and the making of the world." -- Vassilis Lambropoulos, C. P. Cavafy Professor of Modern Greek, University of Michigan, author of
The Rise of Eurocentrism"Until now Cavafy's adolescence in England has been buried in obscurity; and much of his creative life in Alexandria has been unexplained. But now we have a work of literary criticism backed by genealogy and solid ethnography which places the extended Cavafy family at the heart of the artistic avant garde in 1870s London. Peter Jeffreys reveals the family’s intimacy—both as patrons and lovers—with leading painters and poets. The precocious young Cavafy was raised in a milieu that gave shape to his poet’s technique and sensibility, that encouraged him to be sexually bold and shameless, and that directed his art for the rest of his life. Linking aestheticism in England to the decadence of Cavafy’s poetry, Jeffreys has done more than follow a literary thread; he has shown how Cavafy was literally a child of these movements. With this new advance, Jeffreys is well on his way towards a comprehensive literary biography of Constantine Cavafy." -- Michael Haag, author of
Alexandria: City of MemoryTable of ContentsPrologue: "Dangerous Thoughts"1. "Aesthetic to the point of affliction": Cavafy and British Aestheticism2. Translating Baudelaire: L'esprit Décadent and the Early Writings3. Pictorialist Poetics: Transpositioning Word and Image4. Paterian Decadence: Hellenism, Hedonism, and the Matter of Rome5. Cavafy’s Byzantium: Historicizing Fantasies of Exquisite DeclineEpilogue: Decadence’s Gay LegacyBibliography
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
