Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Stilling, Robert (1977-....)
Titre(s) : Beginning at the end [Texte imprimé] : decadence, modernism, and postcolonial poetry / Robert Stilling
Publication : Cambridge (Mass.) : Harvard university press, 2018
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (384 p.) : ill. ; 25 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references and index
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.
Sujet(s) : Décadentisme -- Pays en développement
Modernisme (littérature) -- Pays en développement
Littérature postcoloniale
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780674984431. - ISBN 0674984439 (rel.)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb45560462x
Notice n° :
FRBNF45560462
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)
Table des matières : Introduction: Decadence and decolonization ; Agha Shahid Ali, Oscar Wilde, and the
politics of form for form's sake ; Decadence and the visual arts in Derek Walcott's
West Indies ; Decadence and antirealism in the art of Yinka Shonibare ; Bernardine
Evaristo's silver age poetics ; Decadence and the archive in Derek Mahon's The yellow
Book ; Conclusion: Dandies at the gate.
