Decadent Catholicism And The Making Of Modernism

Author : Martin Lockerd
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350137669
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism written by Martin Lockerd and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

Author : Jane Desmarais
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190066954
Total Pages : 745 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Decadence written by Jane Desmarais and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

Author : Sarah Green
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108918123
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence written by Sarah Green and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-09 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can sexual restraint be good for you? Many Victorians thought so. This book explores the surprisingly positive construction of sexual restraint in an unlikely place: late nineteenth-century Decadence. Reading Decadent texts alongside Victorian writing about sexual health, including medical literature, adverts, advice books, and periodical articles, it identifies an intellectual Paterian tradition of sensuous continence, in which 'healthy' pleasure is distinguished from its 'harmful' counterpart. Recent work on Decadent sexuality concentrates on transgression and subversion, with restraint interpreted ahistorically as evidence of repression/sublimation or queer coding. Here Sarah Green examines the work of Walter Pater, Lionel Johnson, Vernon Lee, and George Moore to outline a co-extensive alternative approach to sexuality where restraint figured as a productive part of the 'aesthetic life', or a practical ethics shaped by aesthetic principles. Attending to this tradition reveals neglected connections within and beyond Decadence, bringing fresh perspective to its late nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.

Author : Charles Andrews
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350362042
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English Modernist Novel as Political Theology written by Charles Andrews and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.

Author : E. Tonning
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137319143
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernism and Christianity written by E. Tonning and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-01-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By theorising the idea of 'formative tensions' between cultural Modernism and Christianity, and by in-depth case studies of James Joyce, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, the book argues that no coherent account of Modernism can ignore the continuing impact of Christianity.

Author : David Weir
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Decadence and the Making of Modernism written by David Weir and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural phenomenon known as "decadence" has often been viewed as an ephemeral artistic vogue that fluorished briefly in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This study makes the case for decadence as a literary movement in its own right, based on a set of aesthetic principles that formed a transitional link between romanticism and modernism. Understood in this developmental context, decadence represents the aesthetic substratum of a wide range of fin-de-siecle literary schools, including naturalism, realism, Parnassianism, aestheticism, and symbolism. As an impulse toward modernism, it prefigures the thematic, structural, and stylistic concerns of later literature. David Weir demonstrates his thesis by analyzing a number of French, English, Italian, and American novels, each associated with some specific decadent literary tendency. The book concludes by arguing that the decadent sensibility persists in popular culture and contemporary theory, with multiculturalism and postmodernism representing its most current manifestations.

Author : Louis A. Ruprecht
Publisher : SUNY Press
ISBN 13 : 9780791429334
Total Pages : 278 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Afterwords written by Louis A. Ruprecht and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading both philosophical and theological texts, this book presents an argument against nostalgia: against the myth of a Golden Age, against the posture that sees "modernity" as a problem to be solved.

Author : Una M. Cadegan
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801468981
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book All Good Books Are Catholic Books written by Una M. Cadegan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was largely antagonistic. Naturally opposed to secularization, skeptical of capitalist markets indifferent to questions of justice, confused and appalled by new forms of high and low culture, and resistant to the social and economic freedom of women—in all of these ways the Catholic Church set itself up as a thoroughly anti-modern institution. Yet, in and through the period from World War I to Vatican II, the Church did engage with, react to, and even accommodate various aspects of modernity. In All Good Books Are Catholic Books, Una M. Cadegan shows how the Church’s official position on literary culture developed over this crucial period. The Catholic Church in the United States maintained an Index of Prohibited Books and the National Legion of Decency (founded in 1933) lobbied Hollywood to edit or ban movies, pulp magazines, and comic books that were morally suspect. These regulations posed an obstacle for the self-understanding of Catholic American readers, writers, and scholars. But as Cadegan finds, Catholics developed a rationale by which they could both respect the laws of the Church as it sought to protect the integrity of doctrine and also engage the culture of artistic and commercial freedom in which they operated as Americans. Catholic literary figures including Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton are important to Cadegan’s argument, particularly as their careers and the reception of their work demonstrate shifts in the relationship between Catholicism and literary culture. Cadegan trains her attention on American critics, editors, and university professors and administrators who mediated the relationship among the Church, parishioners, and the culture at large.

Author : Ellis Hanson
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674194441
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Decadence and Catholicism written by Ellis Hanson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book. Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.

Author : Ross Douthat
Publisher : Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1476785252
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Decadent Society written by Ross Douthat and published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-16 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.