San Antonio College Library

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...

The biography of a gay French nobleman who served as models for famous characters in novels: Des Esseintes (Huysmans), Dorian Gray-in part (Wilde) and Baron Charlus (Proust).

"A Baedeker of Decadence presents an international collection of thirty-two works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on the many strands of this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon."--Jacket.

"Decadent Culture in the United States traces the development of the decadent movement in America from its beginnings in the 1890s to its brief revival in the 1920s. During the fin de siecle, many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline since the frontier had ended and the country's "manifest destiny" seemed to be fulfilled. Decadence - the cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy so familiar in nineteenth-century...