The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson

ISBN-13: 9780748690923 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 224 str.

Kostas Boyiopoulos

Opis

This book enquires into the problem of venerating artificiality and the inaccessibility of beauty associated with it whilst engaging in the sensuous, immediate experience as advocated by Walter Pater. It examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Ernest Dowson. It sees their poems as sites where the self sensually collides with or is immersed in their artifice. This is understood through the shift from Aestheticism to Decadence, which is marked by a greater emphasis on heterodox erotic experience. This study examines Wilde's early poetry and its role in triggering this shift. It shows how the idea of an erotic encounter with artifice reaches its apex in Symons, and how in Dowson it ripens into vexed non-encounters.

Spis treści

Series Editor’s Preface; Acknowledgments; List of Abbreviations; 1. Introduction: Sensual Text, Textual Sense: Aestheticism to Decadence; Part One: OSCAR WILDE; 2. ‘That love-enraptured tune’: Eros and Art(ifice); 3. ‘Charmides’ and The Sphinx: Crashing into Objets d’Art; Part Two: ARTHUR SYMONS; 4. Strangeness and the City: The Self among Fragmented Impressions; 5. Bianca’s Body: Nerves and the Flâneurie of Flesh; Part Three: ERNEST DOWSON; 6. ‘A Little While’: Expiration in Suspension; 7. Closely Apart: Aestheticising the Non-encounter; 8. Coda: Modernist Responses; Bibliography; Index