"I am going to surprise you very much. . . All my life I have been fascinated by the spiritual life - when I was a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over the mantelpiece - but after all to do one's work when there are things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion."
Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's : An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose
(Aubrey Beardsley (Illustrator), Karl Beckson (Introduction)
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In this revised edition of Karl Beckson's classic anthology, The Ballad of Reading Gaol had been included in its entirety; the bibliography has been completely updated; and Professor Beckson's notes and commentary have been expanded from the first edition published in 1966.
The so-called Decadent or Aesthetic period remains one of the most interesting in the history of the arts. The poetry and prose of such writers as Yeats, Wilde, Symons, Johnson, Dowson, Michael Field, Olive Custance, pater and others are included in this collection, along with sixteen of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings.
Aubrey Beardsley
(Stephen Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley)
Biographer Stephen Calloway curated the centenary exhibition of Beardsley's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London during autumn of 1998. He closely scrutinizes Beardsley's life in the light of his subversive drawings in this in-depth, superbly illustrated biography that coincides with the exhibition.
Salome & Under the Hill
(Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley (Contributor))
This joint centennial edition of Salome and Under the Hill, united by seventeen of Beardsley's unsurpassable drawings, is a timely rehabilitation of these two all-too-often ignored fin-de-siecle texts, and constitues a volume of unadulterated Decadent Erotica which must surely stand as the apogee of its kind.
Censored, banned, and ridiculed upon publication, Oscar Wilde's Salome, written in 1892 in the French language, must now be viewed as one of the greatest of all Decadent texts; an aesthetic masterwork which has seldom been accorded due respect.
Salome is an evocation of biblical horror in which blasphemies abound. More than this, its atmosphere seethes with a dangerous erotic charge from the very outset. Relentless, hypnotic repetitions in the words, arranged in fugue candences, the tale unfolds with the inexorable acceleration of an orgasmic nightmare.
Aubrey Beardsley's Under the Hill, a short work commenced in 1894, but left unfinished at the time of Beardsley's premature demise, nonetheless achieves the quintessence of Decadence, an evocation of a synaesthetic pleasure dome. A unique and indispensable text for any who seek the uttermost extremes of the manifest imagination.
