The history of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de si�cle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. The decline of Rome provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for aesthetic gain. What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of the pessimism that accompanies imperial decline. This delight in decline informs the rich canon of decadence that runs from Joris-Karl Huysmans's � Rebours to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores the conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence--the excess of artifice--and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Literature & Fiction

Weir, David

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

The Romantic myth of Bohemia originated in the early nineteenth century as a way of describing the new conditions faced by artists and writers when the previous system of aristocratic patronage collapsed in the wake of the Age of Revolution. Without the patron system, the artist was free to move around, to seek an audience wherever fortune beckoned. This marketing model likening the artist's vagabond career to the "gypsy" life helps to explain part of the bohemian myth, but not all of it. Most bohemians have scant interest in commercial gain and are not so itinerant after all, confining their movements to down-market urban neighbourhoods where the rent is cheap and the morals are loose. This Very Short Introduction traces the myth of Bohemia through its various fictional manifestations, from Henry Murger's novel Scenes of Bohemian Life (1851) and Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896) to Aki Kaurismäki's film La vie de Bohème (1992), and Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (1996). It goes on to examine the history of different bohemian communities, including those in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the Schwabing section of Munich, and the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York. David Weir also considers the politics of Bohemia and traces the careers of the artists Gustave Courbet and Pablo Picasso and the great chanteuses Yvette Guilbert, Fréhel, and Edith Piaf in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris, where a rich tradition of popular culture indebted to Bohemia also developed. Weir concludes with a discussion of the legacy of Bohemia today as something outworn and dying, an exhausted tradition that somehow continues.

Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

History & Criticism

Secrets: The CIA's War at Home

This eye-opening exposé, the result of fifteen years of investigative work, uncovers the CIA's systematic efforts to suppress and censor information over several decades. An award-winning journalist, Angus Mackenzie waged and won a lawsuit against the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and became a leading expert on questions concerning government censorship and domestic spying. In Secrets, he reveals how federal agencies--including the Department of Defense, the executive branch, and the CIA--have monitored and controlled public access to information. Mackenzie lays bare the behind-the-scenes evolution of a policy of suppression, repression, spying, and harassment. Secrecy operations originated during the Cold War as the CIA instituted programs of domestic surveillance and agent provocateur activities. As antiwar newspapers flourished, the CIA set up an "underground newspaper" desk devoted, as Mackenzie reports, to various counterintelligence activities--from infiltrating organizations to setting up CIA-front student groups. Mackenzie also tracks the policy of requiring secrecy contracts for all federal employees who have contact with sensitive information, insuring governmental review of all their writings after leaving government employ. Drawing from government documents and scores of interviews, many of which required intense persistence and investigative guesswork to obtain, and amassing story after story of CIA malfeasance, Mackenzie gives us the best account we have of the government's present security apparatus. This is a must-read book for anyone interested in the inside secrets of government spying, censorship, and the abrogation of First Amendment rights.

History

MacKenzie, Angus

Americas

University of California Press

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

The paradoxes of the American decadent movement in the 1890s and 1920s.

Arts & Photography

State Univ of New York Pr

The paradoxes of the American decadent movement in the 1890s and 1920s. Decadent Culture in the United States traces the development of the decadent movement in America from its beginnings in the 1890s to its brief revival in the 1920s. During the fin de siècle, many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline since the frontier had ended and the country’s “manifest destiny” seemed to be fulfilled. Decadence―the cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy so familiar in nineteenth-century Europe―was thus taken up by groups of artists and writers in major American cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Noting that the capitalist, commercial context of America provided possibilities for the entrance of decadence into popular culture to a degree that simply did not occur in Europe, David Weir argues that American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons. By going against the grain of dominant social and cultural trends, American writers produced a native variant of Continental Decadence that eventually dissipated “upward” into the rising leisure class and “downward” into popular, commercial culture.

State University of New York Press

The idea of covenant was at the heart of early New England society. In this singular book David Weir explores the origins and development of covenant thought in America by analyzing the town and church documents written and signed by seventeenth-century New Englanders. Unmatched in the breadth of its scope, this study takes into account all of the surviving covenants in all of the New England colonies. Weir's comprehensive survey of seventeenth-century covenants leads to a more complex picture of early New England than what emerges from looking at only a few famous civil covenants like the Mayflower Compact. His work shows covenant theology being transformed into a covenantal vision for society but also reveals the stress and strains on church-state relationships that eventually led to more secularized colonial governments in eighteenth-century New England. He concludes that New England colonial society was much more "English" and much less "American" than has often been thought, and that the New England colonies substantially mirrored religious and social change in Old England.

Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion (EUSLR))

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Decadence and the Making of Modernism

University of Massachusetts Press

We are currently updating our website and have not yet posted complete information for this title. Many of our books are in the Google preview program, which allows readers to view up to 20% of the book. If this title is active in the program, you will find the Google Preview button in the sidebar below.

Exposes the problems surrounding the international marketing of pesticides banned in the United States, describing growing incidences of pesticide poisoning in farm workers and through the exportation of contaminated foods

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

Schapiro, Mark

Self-Help

FOOD FIRST BOOKS *

The Bhopal Syndrome (Routledge Revivals)

First published in 1988, The Bhopal Syndrome documents one of world's worst industrial disaster: The Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984. The tragedy exposed a variety of issues plaguing rapid development such as the negligence of corporations and government, prioritizing of commercial benefits over human lives, inadequate post-disaster rehabilitation and compensation, and frightening levels of environmental pollution. The author argues that the Bhopal gas tragedy is being replicated across the globe at various intensities facilitating a dangerous normalisation. He asserts that workers and consumers should fight for their 'right to know' about working conditions, chemicals used in pesticides, the harm caused by producing such chemicals, how these chemicals end up on our food as well as the manner in which the chemicals interact in our body. Climate crisis and undeterred industrial development still haunt our reality making this book an essential read for any concerned citizen and for students of disaster management, industrial disasters, climate change, environment, toxicology and workers' rights.

Business & Money

Economics

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weir, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Weir, David

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Weir, David. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Bohemians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Secrets: The CIA's War at Home

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain, 1890-1926 (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Emory University Studies in Law and Religion (EUSLR))

Decadence and the Making of Modernism

Decadence and the Making of Modernism

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

The Bhopal Syndrome (Routledge Revivals)