A topic that has become increasingly central to the study of art, performance and literature, the term mimesis has long been used to refer to the relationship between an image and its 'real' original. However, recent theorists have extended the concept, highlighting new perspectives on key concerns, such as the nature of identity.

Matt Potolsky presents a clear introduction to this potentially daunting concept, examining:

• the foundations of mimetic theory in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Aristotle
• three key versions of mimesis: imitatio or rhetorical imitation, theatre and theatricality, and artistic realism
• the position of mimesis in modern theories of identity and culture, through theorists such as Freud, Lacan, Girard and Baudrillard
• the possible future of mimetic theory in the concept of 'memes', which connects evolutionary biology and theories of cultural reproduction.

A multidisciplinary study of a term rapidly returning to the forefront of contemporary theory, Mimesis is a welcome guide for readers in such fields as literature, performance and cultural studies.

Why do recent depictions of government secrecy and surveillance so often use images suggesting massive size and scale: gigantic warehouses, remote black sites, numberless security cameras? Drawing on post-War American art, film, television, and fiction, Matthew Potolsky argues that the aesthetic of the sublime provides a privileged window into the nature of modern intelligence, a way of describing the curiously open secret of covert operations. The book tracks the development of the national security sublime from the Cold War to the War on Terror, and places it in a long history of efforts by artists and writers to represent political secrecy.

A topic that has become increasingly central to the study of art, performance and literature, the term mimesis has long been used to refer to the relationship between an image and its 'real' original. However, recent theorists have extended the concept, highlighting new perspectives on key concerns, such as the nature of identity.

Matt Potolsky presents a clear introduction to this potentially daunting concept, examining:

• the foundations of mimetic theory in ancient philosophy, from Plato to Aristotle
• three key versions of mimesis: imitatio or rhetorical imitation, theatre and theatricality, and artistic realism
• the position of mimesis in modern theories of identity and culture, through theorists such as Freud, Lacan, Girard and Baudrillard
• the possible future of mimetic theory in the concept of 'memes', which connects evolutionary biology and theories of cultural reproduction.

A multidisciplinary study of a term rapidly returning to the forefront of contemporary theory, Mimesis is a welcome guide for readers in such fields as literature, performance and cultural studies.

Classical Studies is Volume 8 in the ten-volume Collected Works of Walter Pater. Among Victorian writers, Pater (1839-1894) challenged academic and religious orthodoxies, defended 'the love of art for its own sake', developed a new genre of prose fiction (the 'imaginary portrait'), set new standards for intermedial and cross-disciplinary criticism, and made 'style' the watchword for creativity and life. Pater carried this spirit into his studies of Greek mythology and sculpture in the 1870s and 1880s-among the most important encounters of any Victorian writer with the classical tradition. Pater's classical studies offer revisionary accounts of the myths of Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and undertake original interpretations of the history of Greek sculpture and tragedy. Deeply informed by, but never beholden to, the verities of classical scholarship, Pater approaches Greek myth and art from the perspective of what he famously called 'aesthetic criticism': with an eye to their beauty and the ways they speak to modern life. Pater's interpretations of classical culture cut against the grain of the high Victorian appreciation of ancient Greece, which imagined a placid world of reason and pure white beauty. Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Pater is by contrast attentive to the dark side of antiquity, highlighting its depths of emotion, its dissident sexuality, its gaudy colours, and its transgressive challenges to the ruling order. These essays were highly influential among Pater's younger contemporaries, and would later inform works like James Joyce's Ulysses, which likewise traces links between ancient Greece and modern life.

"This splendid collection of essays, with its lucid, witty, and masterful introduction by the editors, will transform our understanding of the decadent aesthetic, and demonstrate its relevance to a wide range of important literature and art in Europe, England, the United States, and Latin America in the past 150 years. It is required and rewarding reading."--Elaine Showalter, Princeton University When Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency in 1895, a reporter for the "National Observer" wrote that there was "not a man or a woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the marquis of Queensberry for destroying the high Priest of the Decadents." But reports of the death of decadence were greatly exaggerated, and today, more than one hundred years after the famous trial and at the beginning of a new millennium, the phenomenon of decadence continues to be a significant cultural force. Indeed, "decadence" in the nineteenth century, and in our own period, has been a concept whose analysis yields a broad set of associations. In "Perennial Decay," Emily Apter, Charles Bernheimer, Sylvia Molloy, Michael Riffaterre, Barbara Spackman, Marc Weiner, and others extend the critical field of decadence beyond the traditional themes of morbidity, the cult of artificiality, exoticism, and sexual nonconformism. They approach the question of decadence afresh, reevaluating the continuing importance of late nineteenth-century decadence for contemporary literary and cultural studies.

While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. In The Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation. The Decadent Republic of Letters looks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated, The Decadent Republic of Letters unearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.