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Decadence and Catholicism

1997 Literary Criticism
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Release : 1997
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 441/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Decadence and Catholicism by : Ellis Hanson

Download or read book Decadence and Catholicism written by Ellis Hanson. This book was released on 1997. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Catholicism as Decadence

2008 History
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Release : 2008
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Catholicism as Decadence by : Marcello Fantoni

Download or read book Catholicism as Decadence written by Marcello Fantoni. This book was released on 2008. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the result of two workshops that took place at the Center for the Study of Italian History & Culture of Georgetown University (Fiesole) and dealt with the relationship between Catholicism and the interpretative canons of history. This theme was instrumental to the discussion of the causes leading to the emergence of the concept of decadence during the age of the counter-reformation and of the link between Catholicism and anti-modernity. In keeping with this theme the volume offers a panorama of the various national historiographies in order to highlight the specific ideological and historiographical trends that led to this association. From the discussion emerged both common trends and different declinations of one single phenomenon. Thus, it has been possible to present for the first time both a comparative perspective and a more general view.The association between Catholicism and anti-modernity, which originated during the age of the Reformation and expressed itself in literature, in historiography, and in political and philosophical thought and, more generally in the collective imagination, has become a cultural phenomenon that reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. It has had a strong impact on the epistemology of historical research, has contributed to shape many different identitary paradigms and has become a distorting lens through which to read the role of Catholicism in political debate and in social dynamics. Contributors: Marcello Fantoni, Chiara Continisio, John T. McGreevy, John O'Malley, John Monfasani, José Martínez Millán, Simon Ditchfield, Manfred Hinz, Helen Hills.

The Decadent Society

2021-03-16 Political Science
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Release : 2021-03-16
Genre : Political Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 252/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Decadent Society by : Ross Douthat

Download or read book The Decadent Society written by Ross Douthat. This book was released on 2021-03-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism

2020-06-25 Literary Criticism
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Release : 2020-06-25
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 677/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism by : Martin Lockerd

Download or read book Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism written by Martin Lockerd. This book was released on 2020-06-25. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the movement of literary decadence from the writers of the fin de siècle - Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson - to the modernist writers of the following generation, this book charts the legacy of decadent Catholicism in the fiction and poetry of British and Irish modernists. Linking the later writers with their literary predecessors, Martin Lockerd examines the shifts in representation of Catholic decadence in the works of W. B. Yeats through Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot; the adoption and transformation of anti-Catholicism in Irish writers George Moore and James Joyce; the Catholic literary revival as portrayed in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited; and the attraction to decadent Catholicism still felt by postmodernist writers D.B.C. Pierre and Alan Hollinghurst. Drawing on new archival research, this study revisits some of the central works of modernist literature and undermines existing myths of modernist newness and secularism to supplant them with a record of spiritual turmoil, metaphysical uncertainty, and a project of cultural subversion that paradoxically relied upon the institutional bulwark of European Christianity. Lockerd explores the aesthetic, sexual, and political implications of the relationship between decadent art and Catholicism as it found a new voice in the works of iconoclastic modernist writers.

The Age of Illusions

2020-01-07 History
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Release : 2020-01-07
Genre : History
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Book Rating : 097/5 ( reviews)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Illusions by : Andrew Bacevich

Download or read book The Age of Illusions written by Andrew Bacevich. This book was released on 2020-01-07. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking and penetrating account of the post-Cold war follies and delusions that culminated in the age of Donald Trump from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power. When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation,” its “sole superpower,” the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable. In the decades to come, Americans would put that claim to the test. They would embrace the promise of globalization as a source of unprecedented wealth while embarking on wide-ranging military campaigns to suppress disorder and enforce American values abroad, confident in the ability of U.S. forces to defeat any foe. Meanwhile, they placed all their bets on the White House to deliver on the promise of their Cold War triumph: unequaled prosperity, lasting peace, and absolute freedom. In The Age of Illusions, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich takes us from that moment of seemingly ultimate victory to the age of Trump, telling an epic tale of folly and delusion. Writing with his usual eloquence and vast knowledge, he explains how, within a quarter of a century, the United States ended up with gaping inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, and an increasingly angry and alienated population, as well, of course, as the strangest president in American history.

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