Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s (Paperback, 2019)

1. Introduction: Visible and Invisible Modernity

1.1 The Modernist Mindset: Ephemerality and Corporeality

1.2 Crises

1.3 Between Realism and High Modernism: The Fin-de-Siecle Contexts of Symbolism

and Decadence

1.4 Theorizing Modernity

1.5 The Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Ethics, and Philosophy of Decadence and Modernism

2. Decadent Style with a Symbolist Worldview: Palimpsest, Mise en abyme, and the

Perils of Profound Superficiality

         2.1 The Russian 1890s and Modernism ex nihilo

         2.2 Misleading Mirrors in The Dramatic Symphony

         2.3 Layered Meaning in The Outcast

3. Decadent Metaphysics

            3.1 Diagnosing Decadence: Dracula and The World of Art

            3.2 Decadent Anxiety

            3.3 The Case of Zinaida Gippius

            3.4 A Symbolist Manifesto

            3.5 Decadent Morbidity

4. The Danger of Seeing Too Much: Fin-de-siecle Ethics and Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde’s Salome

            4.1 Decadent Society and the Embrace of the Exotic

            4.2 Wilde and the Tribulations of Modernist Identity

            4.3 The Troubling Gaze in Salome

            4.4 The Untroubled Gaze in Kipling’s Ballads

5. Meaningfulness and Superficiality: Joseph Conrad’s Surface Truths

            5.1 Marlow’s Decadence

            5.2 Kurt’s (anti-idealistic) Symbolism

            5.3 Nightmares of Modernity

            5.4 Truth and the Modernist Mindset

6. When Metaphor Throttles Metonymy: The Perils of Misreading in Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte

            6.1 Decadent Hauntings

            6.2 Symbolist Spirits

            6.3 Museums and Memories

            6.4 Modernity and Technology

7. Conclusion: Fin-de-siecle Endings and Beginnings

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