Book contents
- Decadence
- Decadence
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Decadent Histories
- Chapter 1 Nineteenth-Century Decadence and Neoclassical Aesthetics
- Chapter 2 British Decadence and Renaissance Italy
- Chapter 3 ‘Rather a Delicate Subject’
- Chapter 4 Fighting Like Cats and Dogs
- Chapter 5 Varieties of Decadent Religion
- Chapter 6 The New Woman and Decadent Gender Politics
- Chapter 7 Decadence, Darwinism, Science and Technological Modernity
- Chapter 8 Decadence and Politics
- Chapter 9 Seeds of Discord
- Chapter 10 Decadent Poetics after Swinburne
- Chapter 11 Theatre and Decadence
- Chapter 12 ‘Restless Mystical Ardours’
- Chapter 13 Decadence in Painting
- Chapter 14 Decadent Poetry and Translation
- Chapter 15 Spanish American Literature and the Transatlantic Dimensions of Decadence
- Chapter 16 Decadent America 1890–1930
- Chapter 17 Russian and Czech Decadence
- Chapter 18 A Politics of Modernism in the Poetics of Decadence
- Chapter 19 Camp Modernism and Decadence
- Chapter 20 Making Decadence New
- Chapter 21 Writing Decadent Lives and Letters
- Chapter 22 Decadence in the Time of AIDS
- Index
Chapter 19 - Camp Modernism and Decadence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2020
- Decadence
- Decadence
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Decadent Histories
- Chapter 1 Nineteenth-Century Decadence and Neoclassical Aesthetics
- Chapter 2 British Decadence and Renaissance Italy
- Chapter 3 ‘Rather a Delicate Subject’
- Chapter 4 Fighting Like Cats and Dogs
- Chapter 5 Varieties of Decadent Religion
- Chapter 6 The New Woman and Decadent Gender Politics
- Chapter 7 Decadence, Darwinism, Science and Technological Modernity
- Chapter 8 Decadence and Politics
- Chapter 9 Seeds of Discord
- Chapter 10 Decadent Poetics after Swinburne
- Chapter 11 Theatre and Decadence
- Chapter 12 ‘Restless Mystical Ardours’
- Chapter 13 Decadence in Painting
- Chapter 14 Decadent Poetry and Translation
- Chapter 15 Spanish American Literature and the Transatlantic Dimensions of Decadence
- Chapter 16 Decadent America 1890–1930
- Chapter 17 Russian and Czech Decadence
- Chapter 18 A Politics of Modernism in the Poetics of Decadence
- Chapter 19 Camp Modernism and Decadence
- Chapter 20 Making Decadence New
- Chapter 21 Writing Decadent Lives and Letters
- Chapter 22 Decadence in the Time of AIDS
- Index
Summary
This chapter studies camp modernism’s debt to the Decadent tradition and the political uses to which the camp modernist aesthetic was put in the early twentieth century. The camp modernism of the 1910s through the 1940s compounds the Decadent models from which it emerged. Turning decisively away from high modernist austerity, fragmentation and ambitious, grand content, camp modernist writers such as Sitwell, Firbank, Benson, and Compton-Burnett composed works preoccupied with small worlds and miniscule conflicts, with the disputes between elderly women in a seaside town or the tiny tyrannies of terrible fathers. They imported the incisive wit, cold derision and rococo sensibilities of fin-de-siècle Decadence into a far more compressed and peripheral universe, one that seemed to operate at a remove from the epic and apocalyptic realm of high modernism. Camp modernism’s frivolity was not, however, entirely apolitical, and it employed the camp aesthetic to queer political ends. Camp modernism’s arch dissections of patriarchal brutality and heteronormativity foregrounded the political utilities of camp as they expressed a Decadent disdain for oppressive and inhibiting forms of power.
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- DecadenceA Literary History, pp. 341 - 360Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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