Beginning at the End : Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry / Robert Stilling.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stilling, Robert, 1977- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Decadence (Literary movement)--Developing countries.

Decadence (Literary movement).

Postcolonialism and the arts.

Postcolonialism in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (384 pages)

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In 1857, Charles Baudelaire described the colonial condition as one in which "a nation begins with decadence and starts off where the others leave off." A century later, Frantz Fanon would argue that postcolonial artists were "beginning at the end," following the West's "path of negation and decadence" while skipping the inventive phase of youth. In Beginning at the End, Robert Stilling argues that for writers and artists such as Chinua Achebe, Agha Shahid Ali, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, Yinka Shonibare, Bernardine Evaristo, and Derek Mahon, the notion of being caught between the decadence of Europe and the unformed possibilities of postcolonial cultures marks the founding condition for a postcolonial poetics. For these figures, the idea of decadence would haunt their attempts to carve out a place for the arts in postcolonial society, forcing them to negotiate between their own sense of the demands of art and the pressure to conform to a revolutionary politics. In reimagining the role of poetry and the visual arts in the formation of national cultures, these artists turned toward the oppositional politics and anti-realist aesthetics of writers such as Oscar Wilde to affirm a commitment to artifice and the imagination while fending off the charge of decadence associated with modernism and the idea of art for art's sake. Taking a transnational approach, Beginning at the End expands the study of literary decadence beyond fin-de-siècle Europe, and demonstrates the continuing importance to postcolonial thought of figures such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Max Beerbohm.-- Provided by publisher

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

INTRODUCTION. Decadence and Decolonization

CHAPTER 1. Agha Shahid Ali, Oscar Wilde, and the Politics of Form for Form’s Sake

CHAPTER 2. Decadence and the Visual Arts in Derek Walcott’s West Indies

CHAPTER 3. Decadence and Antirealism in the Art of Yinka Shonibare

CHAPTER 4. Bernardine Evaristo’s Silver Age Poetics

CHAPTER 5. Decadence and the Archive in Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book

CONCLUSION: Dandies at the Gate

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Aug 2018)

ISBN:

9780674919693

0674919696

9780674919716

0674919718

OCLC:

1030304374