Laforgue's collection of stories, the Moralites Legendaires, freely modernizes established stories of literary tradition according to the stereotypical preoccupations of 1880s decadence. In this first complete study of the Moralites Legendaires in any language, Laforgue's stories emerge as examples of parody in its most creative form, among the most original prose creations of the late 19th-century.

Jan Opolsky has long been considered to be little more than an epigon of the Czech Decadence. By detailed analysis of his prose, this book aims to show that Opolsky is a master of sustained narrative irony and an accomplished writer in his own right. Introduction brings an overview of Czech Decadent/Symbolist literature and art in an European perspective. The first monograph evaluates archival sources, private correspondence with other literary figures and includes classified bibliography of Opolsky.

The history of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siècle 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, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. 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, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Parody is a most iridescent phenomenon: of ancient Greek origin, parody's very malleability has allowed it to survive and to conquer Western cultures. Changing discourse on parody, its complex relationship with related humorous forms (e.g. travesty, burlesque, satire), its ability to cross genre boundaries, the many parodies handed down by tradition, and its ubiquity in contemporary culture all testify to its multifaceted nature. No wonder that 'parody' has become a phrase without clear meaning. The essays in this collection reflect the multidimensionality of recent parody studies. They pay tribute to its long and varied tradition, covering examples of parodic practice from the Middle Ages to the present day and dealing with English, American, postcolonial, Austrian, and German parodies. The papers range from the Medieval classics (e.g. Chaucer), parodies of Shakespeare, and the role of parody in German Romanticism, to parodies of fin-de-si�cle literature and the intertextual puzzles of the late twentieth century (such as cross-dressing, Schwab's Faustparody, and Rushdie's Satanic Verses). And they have transformed the contentious nature of parody into a diverse range of methodologies. In doing so, these essays offer a survey of the current state of parody studies.

The "dandy," a nineteenth-century character and concept exemplified in such works as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, reverberates in surprising corners of twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. Establishing this character as a kind of shorthand for a diverse range of traits and tendencies, including gentlemanliness, rebelliousness, androgyny, aristocratic pretension, theatricality, and extravagance, Len Gutkin traces Victorian aesthetic precedents in the work of the modernist avant-garde, the noir novel, Beatnik experimentalism, and the postmodern thriller. As defined in the period between the fin de siècle and modernism, dandyism was inextricable from representations of queerness. But, rinsed of its suspect associations with the effeminate, dandyism would exert influence over such macho authors as Hemingway and Chandler, who harnessed its decadent energy. Dandyism, Gutkin argues, is a species of gendered charisma. The performative masquerade of Wilde’s decadent dandy is an ancestor to both the gender performance at work in American cowboy lore and the precious self-presentation of twenty-first-century hipsters. We cannot understand modernism and postmodernism’s negotiation of gender, aesthetic abstraction, or the culture of celebrity without the dandy. Analyzing the characteristic focus on costume, consumption, and the well-turned phrase in readings of figures ranging from Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, and William Burroughs to Patricia Highsmith, Bret Easton Ellis, and Ben Lerner, Dandyism reveals the Victorian dandy’s legacy across the twentieth century, providing a revisionist history of the relationship between Victorian aesthetics and twentieth-century literature.

Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It arguesthat parody is central to the whole modernist project. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, definethemselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing.

This outstanding volume of 26 essays represents a cross-section of the writings of Arnold Band on Jewish literature. Band, a renowned Jewish studies and humanities scholar, writes on such topics as: literature in historic context, interpretations of Hasidic tales and other traditional texts, Zionism, S.Y. Agnon and other important Israeli writers, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Jewish studies, and the Jewish community. Scholars and students of Jewish studies and literature -- particularly Jewish literature -- won't want to miss this remarkable collection.