Kostas Boyiopoulos - Böcker

For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.

Explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in the poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as it is advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde’s early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters. Key Features• The first monograph study to focus exclusively on Decadent poetry • Gives original attention to Oscar Wilde’s poetry which has been relatively neglected • Makes an explicit distinction between ‘Aestheticism’ and ‘Decadence’• Includes a Coda which considers how this Decadent poetics transmutes in Modernism.Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies, Durham University. His main research specialisms are fin-de-siècle literature and culture, Decadence and Aestheticism, and Anglo-Continental literary transactions. He is a co-editor of The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (Edinburgh UP, 2014) and, with Mark Sandy, of the forthcoming essay collection Decadent Romanticism (Ashgate, 2015). He has published articles on late Victorian and Modernist topics.

The first anthology of Decadent short stories reflecting a variety of fin-de-siècle themesThis wide-ranging anthology showcases for the first time the short story as the most attractive genre for British writers who experimented with Decadent themes and styles. From familiar writers such as Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde to less known writers such as Charles Ricketts,  Vincent O’Sullivan and Una Ashworth Taylor the 36 stories and 2 parodies demonstrate ideas of class, gender, sexuality, and science as well as the Gothic, social satire, Symbolist fantasy, fairy tale, Naturalism/Realism, Impressionism, erotica, and the scientific romance. The selections represent the important role that the Little Magazine culture played in the unprecedented explosion of the Decadent short story in the 1890s.  A full introductory essay sets the scene, while an introduction and endnotes for each story and explanatory material at the end of the book make this anthology stand out.Key Features and Benefits • Brings a variety of rare and important stories together in one volume reflecting an influential literary genre • Expands the scope of Decadence by bringing together male and female voices, obscure and famous authors, and stylistic and thematic concerns such as New Woman fiction, the Gothic, Impressionism, Realism, paganism, class, homosexuality, and science • Includes a detailed introduction, an introduction and endnotes for each story, 3 appendices containing parodies, background sources and a chronologically arranged list of facts and publications related to Aesthetic and Decadent stories, and a select bibliography Kostas Boyiopoulos is Teaching Associate at the Department of English Studies, Durham University.Yoonjoung Choi is tutor of English at Durham University. She also teaches Translation at Durham University and Korean at the University of Leeds. Matthew Brinton Tildesley is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea.

Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors’ chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.

Our collection of essays re-evaluates the much critically contested term of Modernism that, eventually, came to be used of the dominant, or paradigmatic, strain of literary discourse in early-twentieth-century culture. Modernism as a category is one which is constantly challenged, hybridised, and fractured by voices operating from inside and outside the boundaries it designates. These concerns are reflected by those figures addressed by our contributors’ chapters, which include Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, M. R. James, C.L.R James, Vernon Lee, D.H. Lawrence, Richard La Galliene, Pamela Colman Smith, Arthur Symons, and H.G. Wells. Alert to these disturbing voices or unsettling presences that vex accounts of an emergent Modernism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literary cultures predominately between 1890-1939, our volume questions traditional critical mappings, taxonomies, and periodisations of this vital literary cultural moment. Our volume is equally sensitive to how the avant garde felt for those living and writing within the period with a view to offering a renewed sense of the literary and cultural alternatives to Modernism.

For Decadent authors, Romanticism was a source of powerful imaginative revisionism, perversion, transition, and partial negation. But for all these strong Decadent reactions against the period, the cultural phenomenon of Decadence shared with Romanticism a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Reflecting on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature, Decadent Romanticism reassesses the diverse and creative reactions of Decadent authors to Romanticism between 1780 and 1914, while also remaining alert to the prescience of the Romantic imagination to envisage its own distorted, darker, perverted, other self. Creative pairings include William Blake and his Decadent critics, the recurring figure of the sphinx in the work of Thomas De Quincey and Decadent writers, and Percy Shelley with both Mathilde Blind and Swinburne. Not surprisingly, John Keats’s works are a particular focus, in essays that explore Keats’s literary and visual legacies and his resonance for writers who considered him an icon of art for art’s sake. Crucial to this critical reassessment are the shared obsessions of Romanticism and Decadence with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.