Decadences - Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature

Second, Revised and Expanded Edition

Paul Fox, Koray Melikoglu

• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838266237
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Art

This revised and expanded volume examines the intersections of aesthetics and morality and asks what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. As time passes, the definition of what it takes to be D/decadent changes. The decline from a higher standard, social malaise, aesthetic ennui - all these ideas presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence. The conflict underlying the contributions to this collection is that of society's moral contempt vis-a-vis the focus on the fleeting present on part of the purportedly decadent artists; who in turn thought the truly decadent to be the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Containing the Poisonous Text: Decadent Readers, Reading Decadence
• Arthur Symons’ Decadent Aesthetics: Stéphane Mallarmé and the Dancer Revisited
• Cultural Decline and Alienation in Vernon Lee’s “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”
• A Decadent Discord: George Egerton
• Gratifying a Divine Instinct: Sarah Stickney Ellis on Pleasure-Seeking and Feminine Morals
• “Lifeless, inane, dawdling”: Decadence, Femininity and Olive Schreiner’s Woman and Labour
• The Perversion of Decadence: The Cases of Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Salome
• A Moment’s Fixation: Aesthetic Time and Dialectical Progress
• Decadence in Post-Colonial British Dystopias
• “Lascivious Dialect”: Decadent Rhetoric and the Early-Modern Pornographer
• Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Pornography and Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth- Century England
• Sexual Literary Freedom vs. Societal Hypocrisy and Ignorance: Aleister Crowley and the Artistic Challenge
• Discourse of Pathology and the Vitalistic Desire for Unity in Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book
• The Obscure Camera: Decadence and Moral Anxiety in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin
• Permissive Paradise: The Fiction of Swinging London
• Beowulf: Always Already Decadent
• Derek Mahon: “A decadent who lived to tell the story”
• Contributors