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Thirteen Mountain

Literature & Fiction

Reed, John Robert

United States

St Martins Pr

Victorian Conventions

Reed, John R.

British & Irish

Ohio University Press

In Decadent Style, John Reed defines “decadent art” broadly enough to encompass literature, music, and the visual arts and precisely enough to examine individual works in detail. Reed focuses on the essential characteristics of this style and distinguishes it from non–esthetic categories of “decadent artists” and “decadent themes.” Like the natural sciences and psychology, the arts in the late nineteenth century reflect an interest in the process of atomization. Literature and the other arts mirror this interest by developing, or rather elaborating, existing forms to the point of what appears to be dissolution. Instead of these forms dissolving, however, they require their audience’s participation and thus involve a new order. Reed argues that this process of reordering characterizes decadent style, which depends upon sensory provocation resolvable only through negation and is therefore bounded by philosophical and emotional assumptions of inevitable frustration. Drawing upon the literature, music, and visual arts of England and Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, Reed provides a widely ranging and authoritative overview of decadent style, which relates such artists as Huysmans, Wilde, D’Annunzio, Moreau, Bresdin, Klimt, Klinger, Wagner, and Strauss. He related decadent style to Pre–Raphaelite and Naturalist preoccupation with detail and to aesthetic and Symbolist fascination with sensibility and idealism. Ultimately, Reed argues, decadent style is a late stage of Romanticism, overshadowed by Symbolism but anticipating, in its attempt to yoke incompatibilities and to engender a new cerebral form, some of the main traits of Modernism.

Decadent Style

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Review\n“A large encyclopedic study of fifteen conventions of Victorian fiction—including women, marriage, coincidence, the orphan, memory, the occult. The most striking quality of the book is its wide-ranging grasp of all kinds of Victorian materials, for although its announced intention is to treat the conventions of fiction, it makes use of supporting evidence in letters, memoirs, periodicals, illustrations, and other belles lettres…This is an immensely learned, ambitious, and intelligently written book that will probably become a standard and should be in every library.”—Choice\n“A large encyclopedic study of fifteen conventions of Victorian fiction—including women, marriage, coincidence, the orphan, memory, the occult. The most striking quality of the book is its wide-ranging grasp of all kinds of Victorian materials, for although its announced intention is to treat the conventions of fiction, it makes use of supporting evidence in letters, memoirs, periodicals, illustrations, and other belles lettres…This is an immensely learned, ambitious, and intelligently written book that will probably become a standard and should be in every library.” —Choice

Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness

Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed’s well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Attitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens’ and Thackeray’s novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed’s well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating.

A Gallery of Spiders: Poems (Ontario Review Press Poetry)

Poetry

Ontario Review Press

A gallery of spiders : poems

Ontario Review Press ; distributed by Persea Books

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Books by Reed, John Robert