The historical trajectory of decadent culture runs from ancient
Rome, to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle
Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. The first of these, the decline
of Rome, provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social
decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth
century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for
aesthetic gain. What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity
in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors
such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of
the pessimism that imperial decline, whether real or imagined,
involves. This delight in decline informs the so-called breviary,
or even bible, of decadence from Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours,
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley's
drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. In
this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores these conflicting
attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by
examining the difference between aesthetic decadence - the excess
of artifice - and social decadence, which involves excess in a
variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously
cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led
some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress
the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching
consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular
culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions
series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in
almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect
way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors
combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to
make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
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