The decadent imagination, 1880-1900

Jean Pierrot, Derek Coltman

"In this work in the classical French style, Jean Pierrot demonstrates how decadence underlies much of the thought of the last two decades of the nineteenth century and how it extends the traditional boundaries of aesthetics. From the paintings of Moreau and Redom, the pessimistic psychology of Paul Bourget, and the philosophy of Schopenhauer, to the flowering of prose texts in the decadent mode by Baudelaire, Poe, De Quincey, and others, Pierrot exposes the commonality of themes and assumptions uniting diverse expressions and spreqading far beyond national frontiers.