The Dedalus Book Of German Decadence

The Brockhaus encyclopedia of 1896 referred to the decadent literary movement as "a symptom of today's nervous, senile, fragmented society which is impervious to anything healthy and natural" -- and which is primarily French. But beneath the brash and pompous exterior of the German Empire, decadent literature thrived, fueled by the music of Wagner, the paradoxes of Nietzsche, and the writings of Thomas Mann, the movement's self-styled chronicler and analyst. This analogy collects works by Sacher-Masoch, Trakl, Leppin, Przybyszewski, Mann, and other, demonstrating that Berlin, Vienna and Prague served equally with Paris as hosts for this provocative European cultural movement.

The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe’s most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination. J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a ‘black feast’ and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritable banquet, with offerings from the major practitioners in France and England. It completes Brian Stableford seminal two-volume study of the decadent movement.

This volume collects the poetry and prose that served as the model and inspiration for so much of fin-de-siecle English and French writing, providing a vivid picture of sexual excess and debauchery in a cruel and violent society which has never ceased to fascinate the library and scholarly imagination of succeeding generations. The editor, novelist Geoffrey Farrington, provides a general introduction to the literary and political milieux of imperial Rome, and introductory notes to works by such authors as Ovid, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Juvenal. "...concentrates on the outrageous behaviour of the ruling class of the Roman Empire, as described in passages selected from the prose, poetry and history of the period. Their murder plots, sexual deviances, orgies, cruelty and incessant intrigue put our politicians and their peccadillos on a play school level." Time Out

Fantasy is a genre in motion, gradually expanding its reach and historical sources to embrace a global identity Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Second Edition is a snapshot of the genre in this moment, identifying new themes and sources that are emerging to inspire, enhance and invigorate the published works of fantasy writers.

Once upon a time all literature was fantasy, set in a mythical past when magic existed, animals talked, and the gods took an active hand in earthly affairs. As the mythical past was displaced in Western estimation by the historical past and novelists became increasingly preoccupied with the present, fantasy was temporarily marginalized until the late 20th century, when it enjoyed a spectacular resurgence in every stratum of the literary marketplace. Stableford provides an invaluable guide to this sequence of events and to the current state of the field. The chronology tracks the evolution of fantasy from the origins of literature to the 21st century. The introduction explains the nature of the impulses creating and shaping fantasy literature, the problems of its definition and the reasons for its changing historical fortunes. The dictionary includes cross-referenced entries on more than 700 authors, ranging across the entire historical spectrum, while more than 200 other entries describe the fantasy subgenres, key images in fantasy literature, technical terms used in fantasy criticism, and the intimately convoluted relationship between literary fantasies, scholarly fantasies, and lifestyle fantasies. The book concludes with an extensive bibliography that ranges from general textbooks and specialized accounts of the history and scholarship of fantasy literature, through bibliographies and accounts of the fantasy literature of different nations, to individual author studies and useful websites.

Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.

"This is a study of what the main ""aesthetic"" writers of late 19th-century Britain made of German literature, and of how Germany in turn reacted to them. The impact of Anglo-Scottish art nouveau in fin-de-siecle Austria and Germany made it predictable that Keats, Pater and Rossetti, among others, would be well received, but no one could have known in advance that by the time of their deaths, Swinburne and Wilde would be more highly regarded in Germany than in Britain. Bridgwater's documented study casts light on the central cultural issues of the day, including ideas of morality, truth and subjectivism in art, comparing Pater and Wilde with Nietzsche, and George Moore, that chameleon of the decadent 90s, with Schopenhauer."