Consuming Surfaces: Decadent Aesthetics in The Debt to Pleasure

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
King ◽  
Lee
Keyword(s):  
Decadent Aesthetics

scholarly journals “Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Neophilologus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susana Bardavío Estevan
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Gender Performance ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazan ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Emilia Pardo Bazán ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics

AbstractDespite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

Decadent aesthetics and Richard Marsh’s The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Orrells
Keyword(s):  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Commodification Of Culture ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics ◽  
Mystery Novel

Richard Marsh’s fiction made a significant contribution to the arguments that circulated during the 1890s about aesthetics and the commodification of culture. The plots of sensational popular novels and the sights and sounds of the music hall were all deemed unworthy, addiction-inducing forces by cultural commentators at the time. This chapter focuses on The Mystery of Philip Bennion’s Death (1892/1897), a murder-mystery novel in which a work of art – a poisoned Renaissance cabinet – apparently kills its owner, a collector of curios: the dangers of art could hardly be more pressing. Marsh’s novel looks back on a century of writers who have associated fine art with crime, from De Quincey’s provocation that murder could be a fine art to Pater’s and Wilde’s interest in the aesthetics of transgression and the entertaining nature of murder. This chapter explores how Marsh's writing was at the heart of 1890s debates about collecting, aestheticism and decadence.

scholarly journals Alexey Remizov in the symbolist magazine “Vesy”: to the history of cooperation

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
E. E. Vakhnenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Editorial Policy ◽  
Positive Outcome ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Personal Nature ◽  
Permanent Member ◽  
History Of ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics ◽  
Aesthetic Values ◽  
Hostile Attitude

The paper reveals the history of the relations of Alexey M. Remizov’s and the symbolists’ magazine “Vesy” (1903–1909) in the context of the periodical editorial policy and from the standpoint of the artist’s aesthetic values. The documentary basis of Remizov’s relationship with the magazine’s board can be considered his correspondence with Valery Bryusov, as well as fragments of the epistolary heritage of both a personal nature (letters to his wife Seraphima Remizova-Dovgello) and official correspondence with leading employees of St. Petersburg press. The contacts of the novice writer with Moscow and St. Petersburg symbolists, his gradual entry into the circle of modernist writers contributed to some extent to the formation of his artistic guidelines and poetics of his works in the framework of decadent aesthetics. Invited by Valery Bryusov, Remizov published the reviews of the cultural life in the provinces and in the capital for several years, most often anonymously, in the magazine’s sections “Chronicle,” “On Life,” and “Miscellaneous”. His literary works sent to the editorial board did not pass the censorship and were not accepted for publication because of the hostile attitude of the magazine’s owner S. A. Polyakov. Remizov’s attempts to become a permanent member of the “Vesy” staff for six years did not yield a positive outcome. However, they showed the independence of the author’s position from the editorial policy of the magazine in his choice of artistic priorities and contributed to the formation of the writer’s literary person-ality outside the ideological and aesthetic program of the symbolists.

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-606
Author(s):  
Kristin Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

An Ecocritical Perspective on the Vital Forces of Decay

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Denisoff
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Decay Fungi ◽  
Ecological Understanding ◽  
Historical Root ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
Biological World ◽  
Decadent Aesthetics ◽  
Vital Forces

The modern decadent tradition began to form around the same time that ecology emerged as a recognized scientific field. The essentialist biologism at the historical root of decadence meshed with the interest that cultural theorists and artists of the nineteenth century had in models of society as an organically coherent, self-regulating system. Turning to conceptions of decay in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891), this article addresses the authors’ ecological understanding of themselves as humans and as artists, and of the place of decadent aesthetics within the biological world itself. This essay foregrounds not the scientific knowledge the authors had regarding decay, fungi, or rot, but the ontological perspective through which ecological models of engagement and influence permeate their decadent works.

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