The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.

Ten contributions from academics in a variety of disciplines consider the social phenomenon of "passing." The focus is on the construction of identity and its relationship to visibility. Topics include, for example, Jews passing as Christians and the politics of race; "slumming" and class analysis; and 20th century male impersonators and women's suffrage. The volume is not indexed. c. Book News Inc.

This book explores the complex relationship between British modernism and the Gothic tradition over several centuries of modern literary and cultural history. Illuminating the blind spots of Gothic criticism and expanding the range of cultural material that falls under the banner of this tradition, Daniel Darvay focuses on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British writers transform the artifice of Gothic ruins into building blocks for a distinctively modernist architecture of questions, concerns, images, and arguments. To make this argument, Darvay takes readers back to early exemplars of the genre thematically rooted in the English Reformation, tracing it through significant Victorian transformations to finally the modernist period. Through writers such as Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, this book ultimately expands the boundaries of the Gothic genre and provides a fresh, new approach to better understanding the modernist movement.