Jewish Decadence - Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity

"Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Máendes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--

About the author

Jonathan Freedman is the Marvin Felheim Collegiate Professor of English, American Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture; The Temple of Culture: Assimilation, Anti-Semitism, and the Making of Literary Anglo-America; and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity.

Summary

Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity. While used as smear against the Jewish people, decadence was also an avant-garde movement that many Jewish figures influenced and took influence from

Product details

• Authors: Jonathan Freedman, Freedman Jonathan
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.03.2021
• EAN: 9780226581088
• ISBN: 978-0-226-58108-8
• No. of pages: 304
• Subjects: Guides > Self-help, everyday life > Family; Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Europe, ART / History / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Jewish, ART / European, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies, Jewish Studies, History of Art, Modernism, Literature: history & criticism, Art & design styles: Modernist design & Bauhaus, Literature: history and criticism, Relating to Jewish people and groups, Social groups: religious groups and communities