CRITICISM

Photo : Boris Guessel

Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was

ISBN-13: 978-1443846219

Although the root of the Hebrew name "Salome" is "peaceful," the image spawned by the most famous woman to carry that name has been anything but peaceful. She and her story have long been linked to the beheading of John the Baptist, as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, since Salome was the supposed catalyst for the prophet's execution. This history of the myth of Salome describes the process by which that myth was created, the roles that art, literature, theology and music played in that creation, and how Salome's image as evil varied from one period to another according to the prevailing cultural myths surrounding women. After setting forth the Biblical and historical origins of the Salome story, the book examines the major cultural, literary and artistic works which developed and propagated it, including those by Filippo Lippi, Rogier van der Weyden, Titian, Moreau, Beardsley, Mallarme, Wilde and Richard Strauss. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of cultural history, literature and art history.

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Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences

ISBN-13: 978-1443823920

The notion of the symbol is at the root of the Symbolist movement, but this symbol is different from the way it was used and understood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Symbolist movement, a symbol is not an allegory. The Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck defined its essence in an article that appeared on April 24, 1887, in L'Art moderne. He wrote that the notion of a symbol in the Symbolist movement is the opposite of the notion of the symbol in classical usage: instead of going from the abstract to the concrete (Venus, incarnated in the statue, represents love), it goes from the concrete to the abstract, from 'what is seen, heard, felt, tasted, and sensed to the evocation of the idea.' This volume attempts to give a glimpse into the power of the Symbolist movement and the nature of its fundamental and interdisciplinary role in the evolution of art and literature of the twentieth century. It records the studies of a group of scholars, who met and discussed these topics together for the first time in 2009. While illuminating the specificity of Symbolism in art, architecture and literature in different European countries, these articles also demonstrate the crucial role of French Symbolism in the development of the international Symbolist movement. The authors hope that an expanding group, a society of Art, Literature and Music in Symbolism and Decadence (ALMSD), born out of the first meeting, will continue to further this discussion at future conferences and in the printed conference proceedings.

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Zinaida Vengerova: in Search of Beauty

ISBN-13: 978-0820498300

In this book, Zinaida Afanasievna Vengerova, a once famous literary critic, whose importance for the turn of the century European intellectual world is no longer sufficiently appreciated, receives her first full length systematic study. Her intellectual exploration at the turn of the 19th century brought her into contact with Symbolist ideas from several European countries, and she used her profound understanding of these different currents of Symbolism to fashion for herself an ambassadorial role between Western Europe and Russia. In many critical studies she introduced the Russian intellectual world to a wide spectrum of Western European literature, art and thought, including Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, and the French Symbolist poets, Pre-Raphaelite and Expressionist art, and the thought of Nietzsche. As a regular contributor to the Mercure de France in Paris and the Fortnightly Review in London, she acquainted Western audiences with Chekhov and other fin-de-siècle Russian writers. Vengerova was instrumental in developing a theory of Symbolism, especially as it came to be understood in Russia. This book examines her life and work, and the intellectual milieu in which she lived; and serves as a window on Western European and Russian cultural history from the fin-de-siècle through the pre-war period and into the age of Russian émigrés of the 1920s and 1930s.