Decadence and the Modern Novel

Catalog description

As Théophile Gautier said of Decadent aesthetics, “It is an ingenious, complex, learned style, full of shades and refinements of meaning, ever extending the bounds of language, borrowing from every technical vocabulary, taking colors from every palette and notes from every keyboard; a style that endeavors to express the most inexpressible thoughts, the vaguest and most fleeting contours of form, that listens, with a view to rendering them, to the subtle confidences of neurosis, to the confessions of aging lust turning into depravity, and to the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania.” "Decadent" is an enduring term of political abuse, but also defines a canonical aesthetic movement ironically fascinated throughout the past two centuries with the style of empires in decline, including ours.