Reviews
Decadence in the Age of Modernism will be of great import for scholars concerned with Decadent art and literature and would work well as a required text for graduate seminars on Decadent literature and visual and material culture.
Decadence in the Age of Modernism provides essential reading for decadence studies, continues a necessary intervention in modernist studies, and suggests important changes to twentieth-century literature surveys.
This book vividly demonstrates the value of bridging the fields of Victorian, Modernist, and Harlem Renaissance studies.
On the whole, Decadence in the Age of Modernism is a considerable accomplishment that offers much to discover.
This collection of essays offers a series of fascinating examples that illuminate the nuances of this relationship and, crucially, collectively draw attention to the plurality of both traditions in a period too often dominated by the high modernist canon.
Decadence in the Age of Modernism is an illuminating and ground-breaking consideration of an under-examined subject, one that ably demonstrates that the fin not only outlived the siècle, it thrived in a new century.
...distinguished and exceptional.
A timely and potentially foundational text. The level of scholarship in the collection is impressive, and the pieces discuss a satisfying range of both canonical and lesser-known figures, with a valuable emphasis on the role of women and black writers.
This book will be of great value to those interested in the literary and cultural history of decadence and aestheticism, of modernism, of camp, and of queer culture.
The modernists were confident that they had laid it to rest, but the spirit of decadence continued to haunt their works. The splendid essays in this collection show in fascinating detail how a 'new' decadence after Wilde offered perverse aesthetic and political challenges to the heroic narrative of experimental modernism.
This lucid and compelling collection of essays ranges from the late nineteenth century to high modernism, exploring manifestations of decadence in work from both sides of the Atlantic. Decadence in the Age of Modernism presents a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, as the best collections do. It reveals decadence as a multifariously generative force whose energies fed both the center and the margins of modernism, and which lived on as a style and as a dynamic process long after it was considered over as a movement. A significant statement in a growing field, this book will be an important point of reference for many scholars.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Kate Hext and Alex Murray
1. Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism
Kristin Mahoney
2. The Ugly Things of Salome
Ellen Crowell
3. Decadent Paths and
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Kate Hext and Alex Murray
1. Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism
Kristin Mahoney
2. The Ugly Things of Salome
Ellen Crowell
3. Decadent Paths and Percolations after 1895
Nick Freeman
4. "A Poetess of No Mean Order": Margaret Sackville, Women's Poetry, and the Legacy of Aestheticism
Joseph Bristow
5. The Queer Drift of Firbank
Ellis Hanson
6. Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Edna St. Vincent Millay's Decadence
Sarah Parker
7. Woolf and Joyce, Barnes and Beckett: The Legacy of Decadence in Major Modernist Novels
Vincent Sherry
8. "The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan's": Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism
Howard J. Booth
9. The Naughtiness of the Avant-Garde: Donald Evans, Claire Marie, and Tender Buttons
Douglas Mao
10. The Queerness of Being 1890 in 1922: Carl Van Vechten and the New Decadence
Kirsten MacLeod
11. A Decadent Dream Deferred: Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance's Queer Modernity
Michèle Mendelssohn
Contributors
Index