1
LT338 CLASSICAL AND DECADENT DISCOURSES IN LITERATURE
Tutor : Val Morgan
Bibliography
PRIMARY TEXTS
Aristophanes: The Clouds, The Frogs trans. Alan Sommerstein, Penguin
Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1989
Baudelaire, Charles: Les Fleurs du Mal (photocopies available)
Les Poèmes en Prose trans. F.Scarfe, Anvil Press Poetry, 1981 (available as photocopies)
Catullus: The Poems, trans. Guy Lee, Oxford World’s Classics
Euripides: The Bacchae, trans. Philip Vellacott, Penguin
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Notes from Underground, trans. Jessie Coulson, Penguin
Huysmans J-K: A rebours (Against the Grain) Dover Publications Inc.New York
(A recent re-publication of the Three Sirens Press edition of 1931.)
Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice , trans. David Luke, Minerva Press, 1990
Melville, Herman: Billy Budd, Wordsworth or Penguin
Shakespeare: Anthony & Cleopatra, Othello
Stoppard, Tom: The Invention of Love, Faber & Faber, 1997
Villon, François: The Poems of François Villon, trans. Galway Kinell, University
Press of New England, 1977 (New Edition) (photocopies available)
Wilde,Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Decay of Lying, Salomé
BROAD BACKGROUND READING
Drakakis/Conn Liebler (eds.) Tragedy, Longman Critical Readers, Longman, 1998
Ledger, Sally & Luckhurst, Roger: The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History 1880-1900, Oxford UP, Oxford 2000 ( An excellent compendium of sources)
Plato: Early Socratic Dialogues, trans Trevor John Sanders, Penguin
Symposium, Phaedrus, trans. William Hamilton, Penguin
St John, Michael, ed. Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture, Studies in European Cultural Transition, Vol Three, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000
USEFUL ADDITIONAL READING
Adams, Jad: Madder Music, Stronger Wine, A Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent, IB Tauris London, 2002 ( Very good evocation of 1890s literary scene.)
Arrowsmith, William:The Complete Greek Tragedies, Euripides V ed. D. Green & R Lattimore, UCP London 1959 (Contains introduction to The Bacchae)
Bakhtin, Mikhail: ‘The Hero in Dostoevsky’s Art’ in The Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics PG 3354.B2
Barzun, Jacques: From Dawn to Decadence, 500 years of Western Cultural Life from 1500 to the present. Harper/Collins, New York, 2000 D 21 3B2
Benjamin, Walter: Iluminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans Harry Zorn, Pimlico, 1999 (Useful for Baudelaire)
Bernstein, Michael Andre: Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero, Princeton U.P. New Jersey, 1992
Burl, Aubrey: Dance Macabre: François Villon: Poetry and Murder in Medieval France, Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000
Bloom, Allan: Shakespeare On Love and Friendship, Univ.of Chicago Press, 1993
(Contains essays on Anthony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida)
Cevasco, G.A: The Breviary of the Decadence: J-K Huysmans’s A Rebours, AMS Press, New York, 2001 PQ 2309
Colaiaco, James A: Socrates Against Athens, Philosophy on Trial, Routledge, London, 2001 B 318
Daniel, Robert R. The Poetry of Villon and Baudelaire:Two Worlds One Human Condition New York, P. Lang, 1997 PQ 1593
Davison, Ray: Camus, the Challenge of Dostoevsky, University of Exeter Press, 1997
Simon Goldhill: Love, Sex and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, Jonh Murray, London, 2004, HM 101. G6
Goldhill, Simon and Osborne, Roger: Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy, CUP, 1999
Gourmont, Remy de: Decadence and other Essays on the Culture of Ideas, trans. Bradley, 1922
Hanson Ellis: Decadence and Catholicism, Harvard UP, Cambridge, Mass. 1997 PN 56.D4
Huysmans, J-K: The Road from Decadence; from brothel to cloister: selected letters of J-K Huysmans, ed. and trans. Barbara Beaumont, 1989 PQ 2309. H4
Jackson, Holbrook: The Eighteen Nineties, Jonathan Cape, London, 1931
Jones, Malcolm V: Dostoyevsky, The Novel of Discord, Paul Elek, London, 1976.
PG. 3354 J6 (See esp. Part II, Chapter 4 for an essay on Notes from Underground)
Laity, Cassandra: HD and the Victorian fin de siècle: gender, modernism, decadence,
1996, PS 3507.05
Mackworth, Cecily: François Villon: A Study , intro by Denis Saurat , London, Westhouse, 1947 PQ 1593
Mandelstam, Osip: Complete Critical Prose PG 3704 (Includes essay on Villon)
Michael St John ed. Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture, Studies in European Cultural Transition, Vol Three, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000
Pierrot, Jean: The Decadent Imagination 1880-1900 trans. Derek Cottman, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 1981
Pittock G.H. Murray: Spectrum of Decadence: the Literature of the 1890s, Routledge 1993
Roden, Frederick S: Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 BX 1493
Schmidt, Michael: The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets Vintage Books, New York, 2004 (Contains chapters on Sappho and Callimachus, the latter is useful background for Catullus)
Shattuck, Roger: Forbidden Knowledge: from Prometheus to Pornography, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1996
Stevenson, RL: Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1850 -1894) , pub. London 1886 PR 5488. F2 (
Stone, IF: The Trial of Socrates Jonathan Cape, London, 1988 B. 317 (Needs trawling, sometimes unreliable, but some interesting sections which portray Socrates as an anti-democrat. Includes references to Aristophanes.)
Sturgis, Matthew: Passionate Attitudes: the English Decadence of the 1890s, Macmillan, 1995
Swart, K.W: The Sense of Decadence in 19th Century France DC 252
Taylor, Jane: The Poetry of François Villon, Cambridge, CUP, 2001
Thornton, R.K.R: The Decadent Dilemma, Edward Arnold, London, 1983, PR 468.D4
ON WILDE
Dollimore, Jonathan: Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Clarendon Press, 1991, HQ 71
Ellmann, Richard: Oscar Wilde Penguin, 1988 ( first rate biography of Wilde – negligible slips)
Ellmann, Richard: ( ed.) The artist as critic: critical writings of Oscar Wilde, London, Allen, 1970, PR 5812
Foldy, Michael, S: The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance and Morality in Late Victorian Society, Yale UP, 1997
Gagnier, Regenia: Idylls of the Marketplace, Aldershot: Scholar, 1987 PR 5824
Knox, Melissa: Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lively Suicide, Yale UP, 1994