Decadence

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 348-407
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Graphic Designer ◽  
Insight Into

Chapter 6 looks to the end of the nineteenth century to study the rise of the artistic advertising poster. Posters were mass-produced, disposable, and advertised commodities like cocoa and the circus. But they also starred in major art exhibitions in London and Paris and were attacked for their “decadent,” avant-garde styles. In fact, posters offer surprising insight into the Decadent Movement, which is usually associated with 1890s literary authors like Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. The chapter shows how decadence manifested in visual media, including the advertising poster. Though decadence typically connotes aristocratic nostalgia, it was in fact reacting to a new, middle-class consumer culture of which it was very much a part. The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley used decadent visual styles to create advertising posters, shocking critics while successfully marketing consumer goods. As posters became metaphysical symbols of commercial modernity, some feared that they presaged imminent cultural decline.

Seeing and Being Seen

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Hecker
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Gallery System

This chapter introduces the modern strategies that Medardo Rosso developed to reach an audience during his Parisian years. He worked mostly on a small scale and cast in his studio rather than having his sculptures cast by commercial foundries. He also began to exploit the new middle-class taste for cheaper sculptural materials, casting works in wax and plaster and selling them as finished pieces. He capitalized on his experience in Italian foundries, where the cire perdue (lost wax) method was regularly employed for casting bronzes, to generate special excitement around his sculptures. Rosso attempted to personalize his relationship with buyers and circumvent the Parisian gallery system that was becoming the intermediary between avant-garde art and a new bourgeois audience.

scholarly journals Middle class construction: domestic architecture, aesthetics and anxieties in Tanzania

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Mercer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Dar Es Salaam ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Under Construction ◽  
Class Construction

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the new styles of houses under construction in contemporary Tanzania and suggests that they can be understood as the material manifestation of middle class growth. Through an examination of the architecture, interior decor and compound space in a sample of these new houses in urban Dar es Salaam and rural Kilimanjaro, the paper identifies four domestic aesthetics: the respectable house, the locally aspirant house, the globally aspirant house and the minimalist house, each of which map on to ideas aboutujamaa, liberalisation and the consumption of global consumer goods in distinct ways. The paper argues that these different domestic aesthetics demonstrate intra-class differences, and in particular the emergence of a new middle class.

Advertising for Love

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Epstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Personal Interaction ◽  
Matrimonial Advertisements ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses how matrimonial ads give a new and unique insight into the way that rapid urban growth and capitalism of the nineteenth century affected people's intimate lives and their approach to experiencing love. Matrimonial advertisers provide an excellent window into how these upheavals in society were negotiated; they were ordinary men and women who wanted nothing more than to conform to a middle-class lifestyle but felt forced to find traditional relationships in an unconventional fashion. Matrimonial advertisements provided a space, for urban dwellers in particular, in which to experiment with a new kind of personal interaction. Matrimonials revealed individuals who were on the move—both geographically and socially—circulating themselves in public in an attempt to find intimacy.

Renamed: The Living, the Dead, and the Global in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Christianity

2020 ◽  
Vol 125 (3) ◽  
pp. 815-839
Author(s):  
Hillary Kaell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Domestic Relations ◽  
North Americans ◽  
The World ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Global Relations

Abstract Over the nineteenth century, thousands of North Americans and Europeans paid to sponsor and rename foreign children in mission stations across the world. This popular fundraising model has been largely unstudied to date. When the extant records are pieced together, it becomes evident that U.S. Protestants commonly renamed foreign children after their own beloved dead. As a result, these programs offer important insight into how Americans who never traveled abroad still cultivated global subjectivities—in this case, through their connections with other-than-human presences. By nurturing relations with what they viewed as globally active agents, such as God, angels, and the dead, U.S. donors cultivated a sense of themselves as subjects who were Christian, American, and globally active. For mourning families, renaming also seemed to impress their dead’s “qualities” onto foreign children, creating what they viewed as opportunities to collaborate with the dead and reconstitute some aspect of ruptured domestic relations. Focusing on a group often assumed to be the most disenchanted of nineteenth-century moderns—U.S. Protestants in the rising middle class—this article calls for more attention to the “otherworldly” in histories of global relations.

Migration Infrastructure and Brokerage in Victorian Female Emigration Societies

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-50
Author(s):  
Marie Ruiz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Meso Level ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Female Migration ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract In the nineteenth century, female mobility was eased by a variety of intermediary structures, which interacted to direct the migration of British women to the Empire. Among these migration infrastructures were female emigration societies such as the Female Middle Class Emigration Society (1861–1886). This organisation was the first to assist gentlewomen in emigrating. It adopted a holistic approach to British female emigration by promoting women’s departure, selecting candidates, arranging their protection on the voyage, as well as their reception in the colonies. Grounded in a multifactorial perspective, this article offers an insight into how female migration brokerage came into being in the Victorian context. It intersects migration with gender and labour perspectives in a trans-sectorial approach of the history of female migration infrastructures in the British Empire, and reveals the diversity of transnational migration intermediaries interacting at meso level between female emigrants, non-state actors, and state institutions.

Clothing in Context — Nineteenth-Century Dress and Textiles in the Thomas Hardy Archive

Costume ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Thomas Hardy ◽  
Famous People ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Textiles And Clothing ◽  
Insight Into

This article will consider how dress, textiles, manuscripts and images in the Thomas Hardy Archive illuminate his writing and reveal the accuracy of his descriptions of clothing in novels including Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Rural clothing, fashionable styles, drawings and illustrations will shed new light on his writing through providing an insight into the people's dress he described so eloquently in his writing. The textiles and clothing in the Archive are also significant as nineteenth-century working-class dress is relatively rare. Everyday rural clothing does not tend to survive, so a collection belonging to Hardy's family of country stonemasons provides new opportunities for research in this area. Even more unusual is clothing reliably provenanced to famous people or writers, and such garments that do exist tend to be from the middle or upper classes. This article will show how the combination of surviving dress, biographical context and literary framework enriches understanding of Hardy's words and informs research into nineteenth-century rural dress.

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

‘Here in India’: Nineteenth-Century British Women Navigating their Position in the Empire through Children's Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-185
Author(s):  
Jesse Aberbach
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Infants And Children ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
Maternal Roles ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
And Control ◽  
Botanical Study

This article considers how the children's books written by two nineteenth-century female writers, Eliza Tabor and Mary Martha Sherwood, when they accompanied their husbands to India, enabled them to navigate this new environment and their position as respectable middle-class women while revealing how India was deemed a place where British childhood was impossible. Just as many women took up botanical study to legitimise their ‘otherwise transgressive presence in imperial spaces’ (McEwan 219), writing for children enabled others to engage with the masculine world of travelling and earning money without compromising their femininity. Addressing their work to children also seems to have helped both writers to deal with the absence of their own children: the Indian climate made it impossibly challenging for most British infants and children. In this way their writing gives expression to what might be termed a crisis of imperial motherhood. Underlying the texts is an anxiety relating to British settlement and an attempt to comprehend and control a place that threatened their maternal roles.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document