The historical trajectory of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome, to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond.
Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable..
These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly.
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost eVery subject area.
Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today.
In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores these conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence ― the excess of artifice ― and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel.
This delight in decline informs the so-called breviary, or even bible, of decadence from Joris-Karl Huysmans\'s A Rebours, Oscar Wilde\'s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley\'s drawings, Gustav Klimt\'s paintings, and numerous other works.
What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of the pessimism that imperial decline, whether real or imagined, involves.
The first of these, the decline of Rome, provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for aesthetic gain.
The historical trajectory of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome, to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond
