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9 results

  • Chapter 1 - Decadent Ecology and the Pagan Revival

  • Dennis Denisoff, University of Tulsa
  • Book:
    Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910
    Published online:
    09 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021, pp 7-33

  • Summary

    Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

  • Introduction

  • Dennis Denisoff, University of Tulsa
  • Book:
    Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910
    Published online:
    09 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    The introduction raises the intricate cross-influences among ninetheenth-century science, paganism, and the arts by noting the many renowned experts whose bodies are buried at Holywell Cemetary, Oxford. These include Walter Pater, Kenneth Grahame, botanist George Claridge Druce, zoologist George Rolleson, Celtic scholar John Rhys, Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and comparative philologist Max Müller. This intermingling of earth sciences, paganism, and the arts, I argue, captures the ecological foundations of decadence, despite its more popular conception as defined by artifice, dandyism, and shocking non-conformity. The final section of the itnroduction summarizes the monograph’s chapters.

Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910
  • Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival
  • Dennis Denisoff
  • Published online:
    09 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021
  • Casting fresh light on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, literature, ecological science and paganism, Decadent Ecology reveals the pervasive influence of decadence and paganism on modern understandings of nature and the environment, queer and feminist politics, national identities, and changing social hierarchies. Combining scholarship in the environmental humanities with aesthetic and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study digs into works by Simeon Solomon, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Arthur Machen and others to address trans-temporal, trans-species intimacy; the vagabondage of place; the erotics of decomposition; occult ecology; decadent feminism; and neo-paganism. Decadent Ecology reveals the mutually influential relationship of art and science during the formulation of modern ecological, environmental, evolutionary and trans-national discourses, while also highlighting the dissident dynamism of new and recuperative pagan spiritualities - primarily Celtic, Nordic-Germanic, Greco-Roman and Egyptian - in the framing of personal, social and national identities.

  • 32 - Towards a Christian material culture

  • from Part VI - ‘Aliens’ become Citizens: towards Imperial Patronage
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 568-585

  • Summary

    Most historians agree that few examples of recognizably Christian art and architecture can be identified and dated prior to the beginning of the third century. Although older scholarship sometimes argued that this 'late arrival' of Christian art was due to Christians original resistance to visual art or specially constructed worship spaces, more recent studies have pointed to the difficulty of distinguishing pagan artefacts from Christian ones or secular domestic architecture from house churches. Evidence of pre-Constantinian church building outside of Rome exists. A fifth-century octagonal church building at Capernaum was built over an existing domestic structure, believed to have been an early house church located in St Peter's basilica. Both the man and woman have companions, one of them in the posture of prayer. Such religiously ambiguous iconography might have come from artisans workshops, with a limited catalogue of motifs, which were patronised by pagan and Christian clients.

  • 22 - Rome

  • from Part IV - Regional Varieties of Christianity in the First Three Centuries
  • Edited by Margaret M. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Frances M. Young, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Christianity
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    19 January 2006, pp 397-412

  • Summary

    When Christianity arrived on the scene, Rome had already extended its power around the Mediterranean world, and had begun its transformation into a monarchical empire. The city of Rome began to decline in the third century as the empire faced economic challenges. The persecution by Decius issued from a sense that the gods who had made Rome great had to be placated if that greatness were to be maintained. Philosophical schools were a major factor in Roman Christianity, despite the lack of traditional basis. Philosophy is mentioned once in the New Testament as 'hollow speculations', and pagans initially dismissed Christian claims to be lovers of wisdom by calling their religion a superstition. Crucial steps in the shaping of inner-Christian scholarly discourse, together with the development of the categories of 'heresy' and 'orthodoxy', were taken by Justin's school. Justin, together with his pupil, Tatian, and Tatian's pupil, Rhodon, engaged in critique of pagan and Jewish teachers and philosophers.