SEL 2
This collection seeks to examine the intersections of aesthetics and morality, of what Decadence means to art and society at various moments in British literature. Both artistic and social values are inflected by their histories, and, as time passes, so the definition of what it means to be D/decadent alters. The very ideas of the decline from a higher standard, of social malaise, of aesthetic ennui, all presume certain facts about the past, the present, and the linear nature of time itself. To reject the past as a given, and to relish the subtleties of present nuance, is the beginning of Decadence.
Purportedly decadent artists focused upon the fleeting present, ascribed value to experiencing the aesthetic moment in its purest form, and it was precisely due to this focus upon living in, and for, the moment that society often responded by expressing moral contempt for the perceived hedonism of art. The aesthetic rejection of contemporary value added to the conflict between the literary and social inflections of Decadent interpretation. The truly decadent was condemned by artists as the stranglehold society maintained on individual interpretation and the interpretation of oneself. This conflict underlies the range of essays in the collection. The vigorous endurance of fin-de-siècle ideas is apparent in this welcome collection of fifteen essays. [. . .] This collection shows that Decadent studies are in no danger of decline.
- English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 51:2 (2008) Contents
Preface
Paul Fox
Containing the Poisonous Text: Decadent Readers, Reading Decadence
Shafquat Towheed
Arthur Symons' Decadent Aesthetics: Stéphane Mallarmé; and the Dancer Revisited
Petra Dierkes-Thrun
Cultural Decline and Alienation in Vernon Lee's "Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady
Peter G. Christensen
A Decadent diskord: George Egerton
Sarah E. Maier
"Lifeless, inane, dawdling": Decadence, Femininity and Olive Schreiner's Woman and Labour
Ewa Macura
The Perversion of Decadence: The Cases of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Salome
Bonnie J. Robinson
A Moment's Fixation: Aesthetic Time and Dialectical Progress
Paul Fox
Decadence in Post-Colonial British Dystopias
James Whitlark
"Lascivious Dialect": Decadent Rhetoric and the Early-Modern P*rnographer
Eric Langley
Dandies, Libertines, and Byronic Lovers: Erotic Decadence in Nineteenth-Century England
Deborah Lutz
Sexual Literary Freedom vs. Societal Hypocrisy and Ignorance: Aleister Crowley and the Artistic Challenge
Michael R. Catanzaro
diskourse of Pathology and the Vitalistic Desire for Unity in Lawrence Durrell's The Black Book
Ann-Catherine Nabholz
The Obscure Camera: Decadence and Moral Anxiety in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin
Heather Marcovitch
Permissive Paradise: The Fiction of Swinging London
Nick Freeman
Derek Mahon: "A decadent who lived to tell the story
Brian Burton The contributors: Brian Burton completed his Ph.D. thesis on the poetry of Derek Mahon in 2004. He has taught English at the University of Durham, and is currently an Associate Lecturer with the Open University. His publications include essays on Mahon, Samuel Beckett, and Gérard de Nerval. He is presently conducting research on the poetry of North East England. Michael R. Catanzaro is a lecturer at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio where he received his Ph.D. in English literature and where he has worked for the past twelve years. Born and raised in Ambler, Pennsylvania, he received a double-major undergraduate degree in English and Spanish literature from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a master's degree in English from Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe, Louisiana. Peter G. Christensen is Associate Professor of English at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. His specialty is in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury comparative literature, and he has published two other articles on Vernon Lee. Petra Dierkes-Thrun (Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2003) is a Lecturer in the English Department at Santa Clara University, California. Her interests include interdiskiplinary approaches to British, European, and transatlantic literature, art, and philosophical aesthetics of the 1850-1939 period; women's and gender studies; critical and theory; and Victorian and Modernist visual rhetoric and culture, including film and popular culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript dealing with adaptations and transformations of the Salome theme in 19th- and 20th-century literature, dance, opera, and film, and has published articles on Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, and George Bernard Shaw. Paul Fox (Ph.D. University of Georgia) is an Assistant Professor at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. He has published articles upon fin de siécle aesthetics, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Barrie. He is currently completing a book-length study of Decadence and aesthetic time. Nick Freeman received his Ph.D. from Bristol University and teaches English at the University of the West of England. He has published widely on 19th and 20th century literature, and also has a strong interest in post-war British film and television. Eric Langley teaches and lectures in Shakespeare at the University of St Andrews. Forthcoming publications include work on eyebeams, Renaissance suicide-notes, and the rhetoric of anti-suicide polemic. A book length study on narcissism and self-murder is under publisher's consideration, and on-going research considers the literary representation of drunkenness and the rhetorical features of inebriation. Deborah Lutz received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has taught English literature at Hunter College since 1998 and is a visiting Assistant Professor at Montclair State University. Her forthcoming book, The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP), traces a literaryhistorical itinerary of the lover whose eroticism comes from his remorseful and rebellious exile, from his tormented and secret interiority.
She has two forthcoming publications, one on the origins of the eroticism of the pirate and the second on the revivified interest in the gothic romance: "The Eroticism of the Nineteenth-Century Pirate Poet: Byron, Scott, and Trollope" in Pirates and Mutineers and "The Dark Brooder and the Haunted Mansion: the Revival of the Gothic Romance in the 21st Century" in Empowerment versus Oppression: 21st Century Views of Popular Romance Novels. Two of her recent publications include "The Secret Rooms in My Secret Life," English Studies in Canada 31 and "Love as Homesickness: Longing for a Transcendental Home in Byron and the Dangerous Lover Narrative," The Midwest Quarterly 36. She has also recently annotated numerous Modern Library editions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classics. Ewa Macura teaches English literature at the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. She has recently completed her doctoral dissertation on New Women and the rhetoric of Decadence and degeneration at the fin de siécle. Her research interests include feminist theory, Victorian literature and cultural studies. Sarah Maier, Associate Professor, completed her doctoral research at the University of Alberta with Dionysian Dominatrices: the Nineteenth-Century Decadents/ce of Alcott, Egerton, D'Arcy and Rachilde (now with Manchester UP), and she is also a graduate of The School of Criticism and Theory at Darmouth College (New Hampshire). She has published two editions of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, as well as articles in areas of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature, decadents/ce, images of women, literary theory, and children's literature. She is currently working on an edition of Wilkie Collins's Basil for Broadview Press; her other current research projects are on the subjects of Millennial Madnesses: Cultural Paradigms at the Fin(s) de Siécle(s), fictional representations of serial killers and on Marie Corelli. Dr. Maier is also the recipient of the Dr. Allan P. Stuart Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Heather Marcovitch is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literatures at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick, Canada. She works on aestheticism and decadence in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century. She has written on Oscar Wilde, Ella D'Arcy, and Christopher Isherwood.
Ann-Catherine Nabholz received her Ph.D. from the University of Basel (Switzerland) and the University of Orléans (France) in 2004. She is currently working on the publication of her dissertation, entitled The Crisis of Modernity: Culture, Nature, and the Modernist Yearning for Authenticity.
Bonnie J. Robinson is an Associate Professor of English at North Georgia College & State University. She has published articles on creative writing and Victorian literature, including guest editing a special issue of Victorian Poetry on turn of the century British women poets. She is also the founder and faculty adviser of the literary e-zine Unfettered Muse (www.unfetteredmuse.com).
Shafquat Towheed, educated at University College London (B.A., M.A.) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Ph.D.), was until recently a Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Nottingham, and now teaches at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. He researches widely in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American literature and is the author of scholarly articles on Charlotte Bronte;, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Rudyard Kipling, Vernon Lee, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, R. L. Stevenson, Mrs Humphry Ward, and Edith Wharton amongst others.
Current work in progress includes a monograph that examines the interaction between copyright law, creativity and the definitive text in the period c. 1880-1930; an edition of Edith Wharton's correspondence with her London publisher; editing a collection of essays on Edith Wharton and the material culture of the book, and more articles on Vernon Lee and the history of ideas, c. 1875-1935. He is also currently co-editing (with Mary Hammond) a collection of essays on publishing in the First World War.
James Whitlark, author of Illuminated Fantasy: From Blake's Visions to Recent Graphic Fiction and Behind the Great Wall: A Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Fiction, wrote sections of twentyfive other books and has published numerous journal articles. He is Professor of English at Texas Tech University, where he has won several teaching awards.
Featured Reviews:
“The vigorous endurance of fin-de-siècle ideas is apparent in this welcome collection of fifteen essays. (. . .) This collection shows that Decadent studies are in no danger of decline.”
English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 51.2 (2008)
400 pages, Paperback. 2006
ISBN 3-89821-573-3
ISSN 1614-4651
Deutsch | 
English
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