A reconsideration of Chinese decadent (tuifei) poetry which argues that this poetry is not a marginal trend but rather a vital part of the Chinese literary tradition.

Discusses literary representations of death to explore the relation between writing and death--death understood as both the death of the individual and the death of meaning.

This intertextual study of decadent (tuifei) poetry demystifies it by using tuifei as a critical term and by situating it within a conventional system of signs. The Poetics of Decadence focuses on four major poets during the Southern Dynasties (420-869) and Late Tang Periods (826-904) when decadent poetry was produced in great quantity, namely Xiao Gang, Li He, Wen Tingyun, and Li Shangyin. The author argues that decadent poetry challenged the canonical concept and practice of poetry as established by "The Great Preface" to The Book of Songs and by the poetry of the Han, Wei, and Jin periods. In so doing, decadent poetry formed a poetic genre with a unique, complex, and self-reflexive verbal system. The rich and complex nature of decadent poetry gives it remarkable resilience in the face of violent condemnation by traditional criticism and allows its successful negotiation with and integration into the canonical tradition. Decadent poetry is not a marginal trend as it has been commonly perceived, but rather a vital part of the Chinese poetic tradition.

This volume explores the themes of degeneration and regeneration in fin-de-siècle Italian culture. Some contributions reflect on the poetics of decadence, while others focus on significant figures of the period and their literary, critical and artistic work, providing analysis from both national and comparative perspectives.

Nordic Literature of Decadence fills a gap on the map of world literature and participates in a thriving area of research by extending the investigation of broadly understood fin de siècle decadence to unexplored areas of Nordic literature, which remain practically unknown to Anglophone audiences. In the Nordic countries the new Parisian movements were seen as having caused a malicious invasion, a ‘black flood’ that was spreading over the North destroying the very foundations of Nordic national cultures. Nevertheless, the appeal of this controversial movement was irresistible to discontents and innovators, even in countries where the old moral, religious and nationalist atmosphere still retained its stranglehold and modern urban, industrial and social developments lagged behind that of the metropoles breeding this new literature and art. The Nordic countries developed their own distinctive manifestations of decadence favouring allegorical and allusive forms, local rural settings and depictions of primitive nature, coupling the philosophical underpinnings of fin-de-siècle decadence with ancient Nordic mythology and rising national movements. Nordic decadence thus became a distinctive and recognizable phenomenon, which travelled back to France and other European countries, influencing the ongoing debate on decadence as it was conducted on a global scale. Nordic Literature of Decadence discusses literature from five Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia and offers additional and alternative perspectives to the cosmopolitan traffic and cultural exchanges of literary decadence that have been explored so far in the English language scholarship.

Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, holds an endless fascination. Yet the ambiguity of the term 'decadence' and the challenges of identifying its practitioners make grasping its contours difficult. From the obsession with classical cultures, to the responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, this book offers one of the most comprehensive histories of literary Decadence. The essays here interrogate and expand the formal, geographical, and temporal frameworks for understanding Decadent literature, while offering a renewed focus on the role played by women writers. Featuring essays by leading scholars on sexuality, politics, science, translation, the New Woman, Russian and Spanish American Decadence, the influence of cinema on Decadence, and much more, it is essential reading for all those interested in the literature of the 1890s and Oscar Wilde.

Explores both the literary features and historical context of poetry written for imperial rulers during China’s early medieval period.

Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe.

This volume explores the idea of decadence through readings of major modernist writers such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.