Decadent movement

Decadent (French decadence " decay ") is the vague and controversial term for a variety of literary movements and individual works around the turn of the century (1900), which have in common is their resolute rejection of naturalism. A common feature is a subjectivist - aestheticized art and belief, which leads to a consciously anti - bourgeois, anti - moral, anti -realist and anti- vital self-determination and is perceived as over-refinement.

This over-refinement was interpreted as a symptom of cultural decay time (see decadence ), and at least since Friedrich Nietzsche subject of a polemical critique of the times. The term decadence was introduced by the French poet Paul Verlaine. He said of himself: " Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la decadence. " This means: ". I am the Empire at the end of decadence " With the Empire era from the First French Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte is until the end of second Empire under Napoleon III. meant that subject in 1870 in the war against Germany. While the sensitivity of poets such as Charles Baudelaire towards the sublime, noise Stick, evocative and morbid at times was mainly celebrated in the French literary scene, Nietzsche demonstrates in The Case of Wagner (1888 ) his negative judgment on a modern " nerve art" as exhaustion and resolution. Oswald Spengler led this alarmist view of history continued in The Decline of the West (1918).

Since an actual decadence can be difficult to distinguish about the symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine or from Impressionism of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke, her such diverse writers as Anton Chekhov are (Russia), Gabriele d' Annunzio (Italy ), Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgium ), Jens Peter Jacobsen ( Denmark), Oscar Wilde ( Ireland ), Peter Altenberg ( Austria ) and Thomas and Heinrich Mann ( Germany ) attributed. In France, the decadent poet Jules Laforgue as Tristan corbière, Lautréamont and writers such as Marcel Schwob, Rachilde, Félicien Champsaur, Jane de la Vaudère, Edouard Dujardin, Joris -Karl Huysmans and Maurice Barres be assigned.

Apart from the thematic staple of the interplay between love of life and disgust decadent often works with the destruction of traditional narrative structures and replacing their coherence through a deliberately artificial totality that one through mystification of plot and the characters, frequent (location ) repetitions and self-reference and dominance of isolated (often visual ) text Details distinguished.