
By Marja Härmänmaa, Christopher Nissen, Jeffrey Walsh
Paintings and literature in the course of the ecu fin-de-siècle interval usually manifested subject matters of degeneration and rot, either one of our bodies and civilizations, in addition to sickness, strange sexuality, and basic morbidity. This assortment explores those themes with regards to artists and writers as various as Oscar Wilde, August Strindberg, and Aubrey Beardsley.
Read Online or Download Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle PDF
Similar world literature books
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Cambridge Companions to Culture)
This ebook presents a complete account of the tradition of recent Italy. Specially-commissioned essays via prime experts specialise in a variety of political, ancient and cultural questions. the quantity offers info and research on such subject matters as regionalism, language, social and political cultures, the Church, feminism, prepared crime, literature, paintings, the mass media, and song.
As Black River Falls, Iowa, prepares for a presidential election crusade stopover at from vp Richard Milhous Nixon, Reverend John Muldaur is stirring up the city with either his anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic circulars and his snake-handling ceremonies. while Muldaur drops useless on his altar, in spite of the fact that, it’s no longer from a snakebite yet from strychnine-laced Pepsi.
Chronicle of a Downfall: Germany 1929-1939
Few figures of interwar Germany have been as influential as Leopold Schwarzschild, the bright editor of the liberal journal 'Das Tage-Buch'. within the doubtful years of the Weimar Republic, Schwarzschild grew to become well-known for his perceptive political analyses and critique of the commercial regulations of successive governments within the twilight of Germany's first scan with democracy.
- Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative
- Joseph Brodsky and the Baroque
- Miklos Radnoti : the Complete Poetry in Hungarian and English
- In Story-land
Extra info for Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle
Sample text
From the edge of the sea came a ripple and a whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of the birds, the hum of the insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over. (Wells 1957, 85) Thus, the earth and life pass, with a whisper rather than a scream, into stillness and ice, predicted by the iron inevitability of cold science. Wells’s story speaks to the inevitability of endings.
All the energy of the universe will still be there, but it will be useless. All large-scale motion will have ceased,—transformed into vibrations of the particles of matter,—and all life will have died. The cosmos will be left a cold, dead expanse of matter. Reactions to this picture varied. 3 Some saw it as proof of God’s design; others saw it as detrimental to religious ideas. 4 This was proof that the universe was created (it had a definite beginning) and that it was moving toward an inevitable end.
In Michael Aronna’s words, some authors “did not wish to confirm the racial condemnation inherent in the discourse of degeneration, but rather sought to extract its promise of evolutionary regeneration” (Aronna 1991, 21). In the recipe for “regeneration,” the ideas of thinkers as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche and Hippolyte Taine are thrown into a mixture that will sustain the country as it crosses the threshold of the century. Regeneration and Agency: Reconfiguring “the Fittest” as the National Leader Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest” was read by many as a natural law that could explain the political success of countries, or the lack thereof.