The new collection features 14 essays relevant to the Literary Decadence movement, including pieces on: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Aloysius Bertrand, Theophile Gautier, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Edmond de Goncourt, and Anatole France. Complete with bibliography and index.

From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a “clever and stimulating” (The New York Times Book Review) portrait of how our turbulent age is defined by dark forces seemingly beyond our control. The era of the coronavirus has tested America, and our leaders and institutions have conspicuously failed. That failure shouldn’t be surprising: Beneath social-media frenzy and reality-television politics, our era’s deep truths are elite incompetence, cultural exhaustion, and the flight from reality into fantasy. Casting a cold eye on these trends, The Decadent Society explains what happens when a powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemate, and demographic decline creates a unique civilizational crisis. Ranging from the futility of our ideological debates to the repetitions of our pop culture, from the decline of sex and childbearing to the escapism of drug use, Ross Douthat argues that our age is defined by disappointment—by the feeling that all the frontiers are closed, that the paths forward lead only to the grave. Correcting both optimism and despair, Douthat provides an enlightening explanation of how we got here, how long our frustrations might last, and how, in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

Andrew Huddleston presents a striking challenge to the standard view of Nietzsche as the champion of the great individual, and preoccupied with his own quasi-artistic self-cultivation. Huddleston focuses on Nietzsche's idea of a flourishing culture to bring out the deep social and collectivist character of his thought.

Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book. Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.

'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.' A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral literature in the French language. While 'Decadence' was a European movement, its epicentre was the French capital. On the eve of Freud's early discoveries, writers such as Gourmont, Lorrain, Maupassant, Mirbeau, Richepin, Schwob, and Villiers engaged in a species of wild analysis of their own, perfecting the art of short fiction as they did so. Death and Eros haunt these pages, and a polymorphous perversity by turns hilarious and horrifying. Their stories teem with addicts, maniacs, and murderers as they strive to outdo each other. This newly translated selection brings together the very best writing of the period, from lesser known figures as well as famous names. Provocative and unsettling, these extraordinary, corrosive little tales continue to cast a cold eye on the modern world. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

"What has Jesus Christ to do with English literature?" ask David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet in this insightful survey. First and foremost, they reply, many of the world's best authors of literature in English were formed--for better or worse--by the Christian tradition. Then too, many of the most recognized aesthetic literary forms derive from biblical exemplars. And finally, many great works of literature demand of readers evaluative judgments of the good, the true and the beautiful that can only rightly be understood within a Christian worldview. In this book Jeffrey and Maillet offer a feast of theoretical and practical discernment. After an examination of literature and truth, theological aesthetics, and the literary character of the Bible, they turn to a brief survey of literature from medieval times to the present, highlighting distinctively Christian themes and judgments. In a concluding chapter they suggest a path for budding literary critics through the current state of literary studies. Here is a must-read for all who are interested in a Christian perspective on literary studies.

Complementarities between political and economic institutions have kept Brazil in a low-level economic equilibrium since 1985.

New Orleans’s reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged “vices,” encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello’s Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance. Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city’s future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable’s “Creole Slave Songs” and Mary Haas’s Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein’s German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt’s novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C. With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance—historically, politically, and aesthetically—that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city’s position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

"Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--

Conceiving of Christianity as a "worldview" has been one of the most significant events in the church in the last 150 years. In this new book David Naugle provides the best discussion yet of the history and contemporary use of worldview as a totalizing approach to faith and life. This informative volume first locates the origin of worldview in the writings of Immanuel Kant and surveys the rapid proliferation of its use throughout the English-speaking world. Naugle then provides the first study ever undertaken of the insights of major Western philosophers on the subject of worldview and offers an original examination of the role this concept has played in the natural and social sciences. Finally, Naugle gives the concept biblical and theological grounding, exploring the unique ways that worldview has been used in the Evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic traditions. This clear presentation of the concept of worldview will be valuable to a wide range of readers.