Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadance

Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadance

Constable, Liz
Denisoff, Dennis
Potolsky, Matthew

Paperback

Series: New Cultural Studies

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0812216784
ISBN13: 9780812216783
Publisher: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr
Published: Jan 1 1998
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the National Observer wrote that there was not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the marquis of Queensberry for destroying the high Priest of the Decadents. But reports of the death of decadence were greatly exaggerated, and today, more than one hundred years after the famous trial and at the beginning of a new millennium, the phenomenon of decadence continues to be a significant cultural force.

Indeed, decadence in the nineteenth century, and in our own period, has been a concept whose analysis yields a broad set of associations. In Perennial Decay, Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Sylvia Molloy, Michael Riffaterre, Barbara Spackman, Marc Weiner, and others extend the critical field of decadence beyond the traditional themes of morbidity, the cult of artificiality, exoticism, and sexual nonconformism. They approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All