Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Decadence: A Very Short Introduction
    Decadence: A Very Short Introduction
    Decadence: A Very Short Introduction
    Audiobook4 hours

    Decadence: A Very Short Introduction

    Written by David Weir

    Narrated by Graham Halstead

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The history of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. 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 accompanies imperial decline. This delight in decline informs the rich canon of decadence that runs from Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

    In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores the 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781541447028
    Decadence: A Very Short Introduction

    Related to Decadence

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Art Between The Wars

      Jun 10, 2022

      Art Between The Wars
      5 min read

    • Article

      Reason AND Imagination

      Nov 1, 2023

      Reason AND Imagination
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Key To The Collapse Of Our cultural Self-confidence

      Nov 26, 2020

      IN 2019 RACHEL WHITEREAD was made Dame of the British Empire “for services to art”. Since her “art” consists in making casts of the interior of everyday objects (the underside of a chair, a room or, most famously, an entire about-to-be-demolished hou

      5 min read

    • Article

      Rome Is The City Of Poets

      May 4, 2018

      Rome Is The City Of Poets
      5 min read

    • Article

      Florence’s Finest

      Apr 15, 2021

      The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo by Paul Strathern Atlantic, 384 pages, £20 Anniversaries always spark book publications, and this year marks 700 years since the death of Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy and father of the Italian ve

      2 min read

    • Article

      Politics In Plautus

      Jan 23, 2023

      Politics In Plautus
      8 min read

    • Article

      Is Classical Colonial?

      Jun 30, 2022

      THE MOVEMENT TO “decolonise the curriculum” has recently been prominent in music, in particular music education in the Western classical tradition. It came to public attention last year after documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests

      6 min read

    • Article

      Dreaming The Street

      Sep 5, 2022

      Dreaming The Street
      7 min read

    • Article

      Singers Have A Voice, Too

      Mar 28, 2024

      THE WESTERN LIBERAL LEGACY HAS REFRAMED “freedom” in an entanglement of misconceptions and skewed viewpoints. In the arts, they tend to be sacralised as an absolute precondition of the artist. Yet for all its lofty intent, art is still a product of h

      5 min read

    • Article

      Post-colonial Bad Jokes

      Mar 25, 2021

      Post-colonial Bad Jokes
      5 min read

    • Article

      I, Me, My

      Aug 28, 2022

      I, Me, My
      4 min read

    • Article

      Inner Beauty

      Apr 1, 2022

      Inner Beauty
      2 min read

    • Article

      The End Of Empire

      Jun 17, 2020

      The End Of Empire
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Vacuum At the Center

      Mar 5, 2018

      A Vacuum At the Center
      17 min read

    • Article

      Commentary: US Should Build A Memorial 'Plague Column' For COVID-19, But Where? Here's An Idea

      May 8, 2020

      Plague columns don't exist in the United States. The nation was founded too late, after the 17th and early 18th century European heyday of memorials built to mark the end of a blistering contagion. An epidemic's brutal cost in human lives and its myr

      5 min read

    • Article

      La Condizione Transurbana / The Trans-urban Phenomenon

      Nov 25, 2022

      La migrazione delle forme architettoniche dal piano globale a guello locale – e viceversd – è modellata dalle relazioni politiche e culturali tra nazioni e città. Piuttosto che pensare agli edifici e ai modelli urbani esclusivamente in termini polari

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Renaissance In Europe

      Feb 28, 2020

      The Renaissance In Europe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Art History

      Jan 29, 2021

      Art History
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Layers Of Ancient Rome

      Sep 28, 2023

      The Layers Of Ancient Rome
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Bohemians

      Apr 29, 2021

      The Lost Bohemians
      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Decadence

    3.5/5

    20 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This short overview of decadence tries to cover a lot of ground--France, Britain, Weimar Germany, and brief looks elsewhere, and as a result it fails to make its intended impression. There is enough here to guide you toward a few seminal works and authors, however. The audiobook is well read.