The Sins Of The Fathers: Decadence In France 1870–1914
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the turbulent decades between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War, France became the crucible of a cultural revolution — one defined by excess, transgression, and a furious rejection of bourgeois morality. Jennifer Birkett's The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–1914 chronicles this extraordinary literary and artistic epoch with scholarly precision, mapping the contours of the Decadent movement through its most provocative figures — from Huysmans and Verlaine to Wilde's Parisian circles — and the social anxieties that both shaped and were inflamed by their work. Birkett argues that Decadence was not merely an aesthetic pose but a deeply political symptom, a reaction against the hypocrisies of the Third Republic and the creeping standardisation of modern life. Drawing on a wide range of texts — novels, poetry, journalism, and political pamphlets — Birkett illuminates the darker currents of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nihilism that ran beneath the glittering surface of fin-de-siècle culture, refusing to sentimentalise a movement often romanticised in retrospect. Her critical approach is rigorous yet compellingly readable, situating literary Decadence within its full historical and ideological context in a way that fundamentally reframes how we understand this era. For anyone seeking to grasp why the fathers of European modernism left such a troubling legacy, this work offers an answer both unflinching and essential.
Author: Jennifer Birkett
Format: Hardback
Genre: European history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the turbulent decades between the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War, France became the crucible of a cultural revolution — one defined by excess, transgression, and a furious rejection of bourgeois morality. Jennifer Birkett's The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–1914 chronicles this extraordinary literary and artistic epoch with scholarly precision, mapping the contours of the Decadent movement through its most provocative figures — from Huysmans and Verlaine to Wilde's Parisian circles — and the social anxieties that both shaped and were inflamed by their work. Birkett argues that Decadence was not merely an aesthetic pose but a deeply political symptom, a reaction against the hypocrisies of the Third Republic and the creeping standardisation of modern life. Drawing on a wide range of texts — novels, poetry, journalism, and political pamphlets — Birkett illuminates the darker currents of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and nihilism that ran beneath the glittering surface of fin-de-siècle culture, refusing to sentimentalise a movement often romanticised in retrospect. Her critical approach is rigorous yet compellingly readable, situating literary Decadence within its full historical and ideological context in a way that fundamentally reframes how we understand this era. For anyone seeking to grasp why the fathers of European modernism left such a troubling legacy, this work offers an answer both unflinching and essential.