Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Matthew Woodcock & Cian O’Mahony, Early Modern Military Identities 1560-1639: Reality and Representation
Get PDFExhibition review: ‘Cos every Little Thing… group exhibition by artists from Studio Upstairs
No full textExhibition review: ‘Cos every Little Thing… group exhibition by artists from Studio Upstairs. 28thJan to 2ndFeb 2020 at the Three Colt Gallery, London. Studio Upstairs is an arts and health charity with branches in London and Bristol. For over 30 years they have been providing positive, life-changing interventions for people with mental or emotional difficulties within an artistic therapeutic community. They support people to enhance their wellbeing and health, reinforce and recharge their creativity, and achieve their own goals (from exhibition hand-out). Alban Low works as a practicing artist and Chris Brown is an art therapist in private practice. The conversation was recorded in a basement space in the Museum of London, Docklands – with some noisy children on the floor above
Mal d’archive?: Introduction by the Guest Editor
Get PDFWhat does the decadent do in a pandemic? I write this from isolation in Western Canada, not a place conventionally associated with decadence, but the place I chose to flee to during the COVID-19 pandemic. I am far from my collection of books and beloved objects here, so am not so easily able to create the kind of decadent retreat enacted by Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours. I am not the first to invoke Huysmans’s iconic hero when contemplating self-isolation in these pandemic times. Indeed, Des Esseintes is trending as a model for how to self-isolate in style in the midst of the latest maladie du siècle. Des Esseintes, of course, faced nothing near as drastic as this. His flight into self-isolation was not from a maladie du siècle but, rather, more self-indulgently, from the mal du siècle, a psychological illness that manifested itself in ennui, loss, disillusionment, world-weariness, and plagued French Romantic writers and decadents of the nineteenth century. Des Esseintes’s response to the mal du siècle was, of course, to retreat into a world of objects, books, art, and sensory experiences.
 
Review: Robert Azzarello, Three Hundred Years of Decadence: New Orleans Literature and the Transatlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019)
Get PDFAs Robert Azzarello expresses in Three Hundred Years of Decadence, when embodied in human form, decadence evokes a tableau of pleasure, indulgence, and excess – a decadent is someone ‘who has had too much – too much nicotine or caffeine, too much liquor or morphine, too much literature or philosophy or art – and is thus reduced to a state of being that seems to oscillate between comatose and enlightened.’ The decadent individual is almost always a late nineteenth-century western European, a Parisian or Londoner who has read ‘too much’ Baudelaire or Wilde and consumed ‘too much’ absinthe. However, as Azzarello argues in this groundbreaking work, the decadent tradition also has a long, if yet unexcavated, tradition in the United States. To date, most of what has been studied focuses on a coterie of fin-de-siècle, transatlantic American poets, novelists and critics including James Huneker, Vance Thompson, Robert William Chambers, Vincent O’Sullivan, David Park Barnitz, and brothers Edgar and Francis Saltus, all of whom spent time in Paris and London at the turn of the twentieth century and were heavily influenced by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. After returning to the United States, they attempted to popularize the decadent tradition through their own works, but were generally unsuccessful. Today, these American decadents remain unknown and understudied, with the exception of a few contributions to the secondary literature such as David Weir’s books, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995) and Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (2008)
