59 research outputs found
Decadence in Culture and Aesthetics: An Interview with Kate Hext and Alex Murray
No full textKate Hext and Alex Murray are two of the leading figures in the study of literature and the arts in and around the fin de siècle, the period during which the aesthetic as a value in and of itself was most promoted. In this interview they discuss the concept of “decadence”, America’s relation to this formative period, and reflect on cultural diagnostics
Aesthetics
No full textKate Hext and Alex Murray are two of the leading figures in the study of literature and the arts in and around the fin de siècle, the period during which the aesthetic as a value in and of itself was most promoted. In this interview they discuss the concept of “decadence”, America’s relation to this formative period, and reflect on cultural diagnostics
Ben Hecht's Hard-Boiled Decadence: The Flaneur as Reporter
No full textThis is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Edinburgh University Press via the DOI in this record.This essay illustrates how Ben Hecht’s short stories in The Little Review and the Chicago Daily News crucially expand the scope of burgeoning research into post-Wildean, American Decadence. These works (written between 1915 and 1921) have been over-shadowed by Hecht’s later Hollywood career to the point where they have all-but eluded scholarly commentary. However, attention to these vignettes of sensual experience in downtown Chicago reveals that they develop Decadence in a unique direction, which fuses the backstreet Decadence of Arthur Machen and Arthur Symons with the pulp fiction published by Hecht’s mentor, H. L. Mencken, in The Black Mask. The result, I argue, is that Hecht’s short stories create a hard-boiled Decadence: a new form which uses Decadent language to explore the continuity of Decadent sensuality in the unlikely setting downtown Chicago, at the same time as it uses the emerging tropes of hard-boiled fiction to define the impediments to having a Decadent sensibility in such circumstances
"The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan's":Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism
No full text‘Poems and The Sphinx'
No full textWhen Wilde’s Poems (1881) appeared in print, a broadside of reviews rebuked it for its derivativeness in imitating Keats, Swinburne, and a host of other poets. In recent decades, scholarship has attempted to rehabilitate Wilde’s early poems by framing his plagiarism as an authorial gesture that serves his aesthetic project. Notwithstanding this, Poems has hardly been given the attention it deserves. This chapter reassesses Wilde’s early verse, showing how it is underpinned by syncretism, where Wilde’s ‘religion of beauty’ is a fusion of Hellenic paganism with Christianity. Informed by his intellectual stimuli as an Oxford undergraduate, Wilde’s syncretic thinking prioritizes style over content. Following an overview of the thematic range, aesthetic nature, and reception of Poems, the chapter parses Wilde’s syncretic impulse, with a focus on ‘Charmides’. The closing section examines The Sphinx (1894), and how poetic artificiality, imbued by syncretism, takes a decadent turn
A Prisoner and His Soul: De Profundis
No full textDe Profundis: part-personal letter, part-attempt on Wilde’s part to pre-emptively write his own history, part-theological meditation. This chapter aims to both trace some of these generic ambiguities to the letter’s influential roots in the tradition of spiritual autobiography, a tradition beginning with Augustine, Dante and Bunyan. Furthermore, it argues that Wilde’s attitude to this tradition is a continuation of his practice of simultaneously inhabiting and deconstructing a particular genre in his creative works. The chapter discusses the way that this tradition of spiritual autobiography itself was re-shaped by Wilde, and argue that in De Profundis we can see him not only drawing on the genre, but actively and vigorously debating its efficacy and validity in a late nineteenth-century context: examining, in other words, whether it remained a valid literary means by which a prisoner and a penitent might examine the state of his own soul
- …
