14 Result(s)
within
History
Social History
Twentieth-Century Literature
English
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Book
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Chapter
Introduction
The social, scientific, and industrial revolutions of the later nine-teenth century brought with them a ferment of new artistic visions. An emphasis on scientific determinism and the depiction of reality led t...
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A Regenerative Decadence or a Decadent Regeneration: Challenges to Darwinian Determinism by French, Spanish, and Latin American Writers in the Fin de Siècle
Traditional literary historiography has divided literature produced in Spain during the fin-de-siècle period into two separate movements: the so-called generation of ’98 and modernismo.1 The first group represent...
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The Spectral Salome: Salomania and Fin-de-Siècle Sexology and Racial Theory
Perhaps one of the most distinctive cultural characteristics of the fin de siècle is the proliferation of the femme fatale as a literary and artistic trope. Across Europe and America, novels, poems, paintings,...
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Decadence and Regeneration: Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales as a Tool for Social Change
Aunt Augusta, Lady Windermere, or Dorian Gray are all names that have become part of British culture and immediately trigger recognition; they are literary landmarks, classic characters that have become famili...
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Death at Sea: Symbolism and Charles Cottet’s Subjective Realism
At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton women in mourning, a project he collectively titled In the Country of the Sea. Although almost forgotten today, in...
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Consuming and Consumed: Woman as Habituée in Eugène Grasset’s Morphinomaniac
When considering the visual culture of fin-de-siècle Paris, there might be more obvious places to look for themes of decay and maladie (sickness) than in the popularly inclined and decorative oeuvre of Eugène Gra...
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Mariia Iakunchikova and the Roots of Decadence in Late-Nineteenth-Century Russian Modernism
The word Decadence first appeared in Russian criticism in an 1889 article by Vladimir Grabar, a Hungarian-Russian law student studying in Paris who earned extra money by writing for a Russian newspaper. In it,...
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Thermal Degeneration: Thermodynamics and the Heat-Death of the Universe in Victorian Science, Philosophy, and Culture
During the nineteenth century, scientific notions of heat progressed from the concept that heat was a physical substance to a new energy-based thermodynamics. This development had a broad impact on European cu...
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Late Antiquity as an Expression of Decadence in the Poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy and Stefan George
Literary modernism reacts to the historicism of the nineteenth century in two ways, either by producing “poetry without history” or poetry of a “productive historicism.” The latter term, suggested by Dirk Nief...
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“For the Strong-Minded Alone”: Evolution, Female Atavism, and Degeneration in Aubrey Beardsley’s Salomé
In 1894, The Bodley Head of John Lane and Elkin-Mathews in London, and Copeland and Day in Boston published the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, accompanied by illustratio...
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Decadent Tropologies of Sickness
An exceptional relationship with sickness is a well-known characteristic of decadent literature. In the decadent perspective on life, malady attains value at the expense of health; moreover, the embrace of dec...
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The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death
D’Annunzio was obsessed with death. In his last autobiographical work, Libro segreto (The Secret Book, 1935), he calls his peculiar memories “studies of death,” as death in one way or another often appeared in hi...
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Decadence, Melancholia, and the Making of Modernism in the Salome Fairy Tales of Strindberg, Wilde, and Ibsen
Throughout the nineteenth century, a profound interest in the story of the death of John the Baptist inspired a remarkable number of novels, paintings, operas, and poems presenting variations in the Gospels’ a...
