Romancing Decay Ideas of Decadence in European Culture

Contents: Introduction; Redeeming the decadent city: changing responses to the urban and wilderness environments in the lives of St Jerome, David Salter; Nature, Venus and Royal decadence: political theory and political practice in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, Michael StJohn; Reading symptoms of decadence in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Carla Dente; ’Bawdy in thoughts, precise in words’: decadence, divinity and dissent in the Restoration, Michael Davies; Dickensian decadents, Vincent Newey; Defining decadence in nineteenth-century French and British criticism, Julian North; Somewhere there’s music: John Meade Falkner’s The Lost Stradivarius, Nicholas Daly; ’Squalid arguments’: decadence, reform and the Colonial vision in Kipling’s The Five Nations, Andrew StJohn; The metamorphoses of a fairy-tale: Quillard, D’Annunzio and The Girl With Cut-Off Hands, Julie Dashwood; A passion for dismemberment: Gabriele d’Annunzio’s portrayals of women, Susan Bassnett; The escape from decadence: British travel literature on the Balkans 1900-45, Andrew Hammond; Books and ruins: abject decadence in Gide and Mann, Martin Halliwell; Resisting decadence: literary criticism as a corrective to low culture and high science in the world of I. A. Richards, Daniel Cordle; Blow it up and start all over again: Second World War apocalypse fiction and the decadence of modernity, Tristram Hooley; Decadence and transition in the fiction of Antonio Tabucchi: a reading of Il filo dell’orizzonte, Marina Spunta; Beyond decadence: Huysmans, Wilde, Baudrillard and Postmodern culture, Nicholas Zurbrugg; Translation: decadence or survival of the original?, Amir Ali Nojoumian; The decadent university: narratives of decay and the future of higher education, Mark Rawlinson; The lateness of the world, or how to leave the twentieth century, Martin L. Davies; Bibliography; Index.

Biography

Michael St John