A Season Of Splendor

"A Season of Splendor takes you on a spectacular journey through this Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when old-money bluebloods and patricians confronted the nouveau riche - railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators - and forged an uneasy and dazzling new social order in New York City. Together, their extreme wealth, elaborate parties, marble mansions, shocking excesses, and delicious scandals transformed the social, architectural, and sartorial landscape."--BOOK JACKET.

Journey through the splendor and the excesses of the Gilded Age "Every aspect of life in the Gilded Age took on deeper, transcendent meaning intended to prove the greatness of America: residences beautified their surroundings; works of art uplifted and were shared with the public; clothing exhibited evidence of breeding; jewelry testified to cultured taste and wealth; dinners demonstrated sophisticated palates; and balls rivaled those of European courts in their refinement. The message was unmistakable: the United States had arrived culturally, and Caroline Astor and her circle were intent on leading the nation to unimagined heights of glory."—From A Season of Splendor Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong—railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators—and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail—as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic.

On 6 November 1895 Consuelo Vanderbilt married Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. Though the preceding months had included spurned loves, unexpected deaths, scandal and illicit affairs, the wedding was the crowning moment for the unofficial marriage brokers, Lady Minnie Paget and Consuelo Yzanga, Dowager Duchess of Manchester, the original buccaneers who had instructed, cajoled and manipulated wealthy young heiresses into making the perfect match. Fame, money, power, prestige, perhaps even love – these were some of the reasons for the marriages that took place between wealthy American heiresses and the English aristocracy in 1895. For a few, the marriages were happy but for many others, the matches brought loneliness, infidelity, bankruptcy and divorce. Focusing on a single year, The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau tells the story of a group of wealthy American heiresses seeking to marry into the English aristocracy. From the beautiful and eligible debutante Consuelo Vanderbilt, in love with a dashing older man but thwarted by her controlling mother, Washington society heiress Mary Leiter who married the pompous Lord Curzon and became the Vicereine of India, Maud Burke, vivacious San Francisco belle with a questionable background, this book uncovers their stories. Also revealed is the hidden role played Lady Minnie Paget and Consuelo Yzanga, Dowager Duchess of Manchester, two unofficial marriage brokers who taught the heiresses how to use every social trick in the book to land their dream husband. The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau dashes through the year to uncover the seasons, the parties, the money, the glamour, the gossip, the scandal and the titles, always with one eye on the two women who made it all possible.

An important contribution to understanding the development of modern New York, focusing on elite domestic architecture—in particular the James B. Duke House—within the contexts of social history, urban planning, architecture and interiors, and adaptive reuse for new functions.

In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally lasting effect on the study of this major Japanese novelist. Thanks to Boscaro’s energetic commitment, Venice became a center for Tanizaki studies that produced two volumes of conference proceedings now considered foundational for all scholarly works on Tanizaki. In the years before and after the Venice Conference, Boscaro and her students published an abundance of works on Tanizaki and translations of his writings, contributing to his literary success in Italy and internationally. The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition honors Boscaro’s work by collecting nine essays on Tanizaki’s position in relation to the “great tradition” of Japanese classical literature. To open the collection, Edward Seidensticker contributes a provocative essay on literary styles and the task of translating Genji into a modern language. Gaye Rowley and Ibuki Kazuko also consider Tanizaki’s Genji translations, from a completely different point of view, documenting the author’s three separate translation efforts. Aileen Gatten turns to the influence of Heian narrative methods on Tanizaki’s fiction, arguing that his classicism, far from being superficial, “reflects a deep sensitivity to Heian narrative.” Tzevetana Kristeva holds a different perspective on Tanizaki’s classicism, singling out specific aspects of Tanizaki’s eroticism as the basis of comparison. The next two essays emphasize Tanizaki’s experimental engagement with the classical literary genres—Amy V. Heinrich treats the understudied poetry, and Bonaventura Ruperti considers a 1933 essay on performance arts. Taking up cinema, Roberta Novelli focuses on the novel Manji, exploring how it was recast for the screen by Masumura Yasuzo. The volume concludes with two contributions interpreting Tanizaki’s works in the light of Western and Meiji literary traditions: Paul McCarthy considers Nabokovas a point of comparison, and Jacqueline Pigeot conducts a groundbreaking comparison with a novel by Natsume Soseki.