Decadence and Depravity as a Theme in Western Culture since the 19th Century
14 Sep 2004 10:46
A lot of European high culture in the early 20th century can be better understood once you realize that many people had a sense that the West was somehow succumbing to decadence, and needed to be regenerated. (This was a major theme of modernist architecture, for instance; also of Fascism, not that the modernists were Fascists.) A lot of it can also be understood as a fairly deliberate embrace of what was seen as decadence, as a kind of sophisticated kinkiness. (See, for instance, the works of Bataille, who was a better pornographer than philosopher.) Sometimes the two overlap.
My own interest in this theme is, of course, merely concerned with the aesthetic and sociological aspects, and not at all with an intellectual excuse for collecting naughty books and pictures.
See also: Artistic Modernism; the Dying Earth; Freud; Jung; Futurism; Modernist Architecture; Nietzsche; Romanticism
- Recommended:
- Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern
- Karl Beckson (ed.), Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose
- Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century
- Patrick McGuinness, "Bruges, Paris and the spectres of Symbolism", Times Literary Supplement 20 December 2006
- Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle
- Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism [Introduction]
- To read:
- Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent
- Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
- Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture
- George Frederick Drinka, The Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians
- Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet
- Asti Hustvedt, The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siecle France
- Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London [Blurb, link to introduction]
- Gary Lachman, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: The Dark Muse
- Stoddard Martin, Art, Messianism and Crime
- Timothy Mathews, Literature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France [Blurb]
- Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: Aspects of a European Disorder, c. 1848--1918 [blurb]
- Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony
