“…Reed’s work is challenging and provocative and should lead to much debate.”
The Year’s Work in English Studies
“Ably argued and demonstrated in detailed analyses of numerous works of art, Reed’s thesis is original and useful, and easily amounts to a major contribution to the phenomenon called Decadence.”
James G. Nelson, University of Wisconsin, Victorian Studies
In Decadent Style, John Reed defines “decadent art” broadly enough to encompass literature, music, and the visual arts and precisely enough to examine individual works in detail. Reed focuses on the essential characteristics of this style and distinguishes it from non–esthetic categories of “decadent artists” and “decadent themes.”
Like the natural sciences and psychology, the arts in the late nineteenth century reflect an interest in the process of atomization. Literature and the other arts mirror this interest by developing, or rather elaborating, existing forms to the point of what appears to be dissolution. Instead of these forms dissolving, however, they require their audience’s participation and thus involve a new order. Reed argues that this process of reordering characterizes decadent style, which depends upon sensory provocation resolvable only through negation and is therefore bounded by philosophical and emotional assumptions of inevitable frustration.
Drawing upon the literature, music, and visual arts of England and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Reed provides a widely ranging and authoritative overview of decadent style, which relates such artists as Huysmans, Wilde, D’Annunzio, Moreau, Bresdin, Klimt, Klinger, Wagner, and Strauss. He related decadent style to Pre–Raphaelite and Naturalist preoccupation with detail and to aesthetic and Symbolist fascination with sensibility and idealism. Ultimately, Reed argues, decadent style is a late stage of Romanticism, overshadowed by Symbolism but anticipating, in its attempt to yoke incompatibilities and to engender a new cerebral form, some of the main traits of Modernism.
John Reed is professor of English at Wayne State University. His most recent books include Victorian Conventions (1975) and The Natural History of H.G. Wells (1982), both published by Ohio University Press. More info →
Retail price:
$59.95 ·
Save 20% ($47.96)
US and Canada only
Availability and price vary according to vendor.
Share 
Permission to reprint
Permission
to photocopy or include in a course pack
via Copyright Clearance
Center
Click or tap on a subject heading to sign up to be notified when new related books come out.
Hardcover
978-0-8214-0793-6
Retail price: $59.95,
S.
Release date: April 1985
28 illus.
·
284 pages
·
6 × 9 in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4447-4
Release date: April 1985
28 illus.
·
284 pages
Rights: World
An Introduction to Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen
A Handbook
By William O. Cord
Today, more than a century after its first performance, Richard Wagner’s The Ring of Nibelung endures as one of the most significant artistic creations in the history of opera. This monumental work not only altered previously accepted concepts of music and drama but also inspired creative and intellectual efforts far beyond the field of opera.Previous studies of the Ring have appealed only to those already acquainted in some way with the Wagnerian art.
Music, History and Criticism · Theater - History and Criticism
Detection and Its Designs
Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction
By Peter Thoms
Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre’s formulaic structure also subvert that structure.
Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Literature · Victorian Studies
The Tension of Paradox
José Donoso’s the Obscene Bird of Night As Spiritual Exercises
By Pamela May Finnegan
Pamela Finnegan provides a detailed criticism of a major novel written by one of Chile’s leading literary figures. She analyzes the symbolism and the use of language in The Obscene Bird of Night, showing that the novel’s world becomes an icon characterized by entropy, parody, and materiality.
Literary Criticism, Latin America · Latin American Studies · Chile
Power of Blackness
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
By Harry Levin
The Power of Blackness is a profound and searching reinterpretation of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, the three classic American masters of fiction. It is also an experiment in critical method, an exploration of the myth-making process by way of what may come to be known as literary iconology.
Sign up to be notified when new Literature titles come out.
We will only use your email address to notify you of new titles in the subject area(s) you follow. We will never share your information with third parties.
