Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Some tanning and marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> A dissatisfaction with materialism was at the root of fin-de- si?cle: artists endeavoured to assert the significance of their personal dreams poses or symbols. The door to dreams and nightmares was opened on images of suggestive power. Artists tried to clothe ideas in forms accessible to the senses or they withdrew into elaborate or exotic environments or they became dandies or indeed some remained in their respectable posts in government offices. Whatever the individual case imagination was recognized in Baudelaire’s phrase as ‘queen of faculties’. The individual fruits of the imagination were as varied as were the forms of dissatisfaction with the materialism of the day. Fin-de-si?cle was less a movement than an atmos- phere. Within it both ‘Decadent’ and ‘Symbolist’ artists revolted against a materialist viewpoint; ‘One is entitled… to prefer the defeat of Athens to the triumph of the violent Macedonian’2 was how the situation was summed up in 1881. (LL)