Classic Stories from the Age of Decadence (Macmillan Collector's Library)

Classic Stories from the Age of Decadence (Macmillan Collector's Library)

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a radical new movement in literature emerged—one determined to break with Victorian moralism and experiment with form, language and subject matter in startling ways. Decadent writing was deliberately provocative, celebrating excess and challenging bourgeois sensibilities. Yet beneath the aesthetic rebellion lay genuine artistic ambition: to capture a unique feeling and atmosphere, to push the boundaries of what literature could express, to create beauty even—or especially—in the presence of decay and darkness.

This Macmillan Collector's Library anthology showcases the very best decadent short fiction from nineteenth and twentieth-century masters. Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale and the Rose captures a young student's lament over the futility of art with exquisite melancholy; Vernon Lee's Dionea tells of a mysterious woman who brings strange misfortune to a coastal village; Jean Lorrain's A Funeral Oration oozes with indulgence and excess; Stuart Turton's Enoch Soames grapples with fears surrounding artistic longevity in the fin de siècle. From famous names to lesser-known writers, there is no shortage of drama, darkness and decay in this riveting collection. Edited and introduced by writer and academic Jane Desmarais, Classic Stories from the Age of Decadence invites readers into a world of radical experimentation and aesthetic daring—a reminder that great literature often emerges from those willing to challenge convention and embrace the strange, the beautiful and the unsettling.

Publisher: Macmillan Collector's Library

Date Published: 02/10/2025

ISBN: 9781035052783

Number of pages: 352

Binding:

• Hardcover

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