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Degeneration, by Max Nordau

"This book examines degeneration. It notes that degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil. This book investigates the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; aiming to prove that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia. Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely accidental, capricious, and variable emotions it awakens--emotions depending on the temperament and mood of the individual reader--but upon the psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

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alternateName

http://schema.org/alternateName

  • "Sovremennye frant︠s︡uzy"
  • "Entartung"@it
  • "Entartung"

author

contributor

creator

description

http://schema.org/description

  • "In a new edition, Karin Tebben presents Nordau's best-known work "Degeneration" ("Entartung," 1892/93), which focuses on the modern pathologies of artistic modernism. Together with Nietzsche, Nordau is one of the most influential thought leaders of a tradition that, as it developed further, had a problematic influence not only on the National Socialist organizers of the book burnings and of the "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937, but also on the Bolshevist persecution of the artistic modern or on Georg Lukács' polemic against the avant-garde modern."
  • "Max Nordau was a famous writer, a practicing physician, a bourgeois examplar of enterprise and energy when his Degeneration appeared in Germany in 1892. He argued that the spirit of the times was characterized by enervation, exhaustion, hysteria, egotism, and inability to adjust or to act. Culture had degenerated, he said, and if criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and lunatics were degenerates, so were the authors and artists of the era. Degeneration, and the controversy it aroused, served to define the fine de siècle. Its targets included Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, Zola, and Walt Whitman. The book was enormously influential. Nordau anticipated Freud in describing art as a product of neurosis, and he set a precedent for psychological and sociological critiques of literature. You may wish to talk back to Degeneration, as George Bernard Shaw did, but you will be entertained by its vitality. Holbrook Jackson, in The Eighteen Nineties, called the book "an example of the very liveliness of a period which was equally lively in making or marring itself."--Publisher."
  • ""This book examines degeneration. It notes that degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil. This book investigates the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; aiming to prove that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia. Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely accidental, capricious, and variable emotions it awakens--emotions depending on the temperament and mood of the individual reader--but upon the psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang."--Résumé de l'éditeur."
  • ""This book examines degeneration. It notes that degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists. These, however, manifest the same mental characteristics, and for the most part the same somatic features, as the members of the above-mentioned anthropological family, who satisfy their unhealthy impulses with the knife of the assassin or the bomb of the dynamiter, instead of with pen and pencil. This book investigates the tendencies of the fashions in art and literature; aiming to prove that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia. Thus, this book is an attempt at a really scientific criticism, which does not base its judgment of a book upon the purely accidental, capricious, and variable emotions it awakens--emotions depending on the temperament and mood of the individual reader--but upon the psycho-physiological elements from which it sprang." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)."@en

editor

genre

http://schema.org/genre

  • "Electronic books"
  • "Student Collection"
  • "Tekstuitgave"
  • "Quelle"
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"
  • "Kommentar"

name

http://schema.org/name

  • "Degenerazione : fin de siècle - il misticismo - l'egotismo - il secolo ventesimo"@it
  • "Vyroždenie"
  • "Degenerazione : fin de siècle, il misticismo, l'egotismo, il secolo ventesimo ; traduzione dal tedesco"
  • "Degeneration, by Max Nordau"@en
  • "Degenerescence"
  • "Fin de siglo"@es
  • "Fin de siglo"
  • "Degeneration ... Popular edition"
  • "Degeneration ... Popular edition"@en
  • "Degenerazione : volume primo, Fin de siècle-misticismo"@it
  • "Vyrozhdenīe (Entartung) Maksa Nordau"
  • "Degenerazione : Fin de siecle. Il Misticismo. L'Egotismo. il Realismo. Il secolo ventesimo"@it
  • "Dégénérescence"
  • "Degeneracion"@es
  • "Dégénérescence. Traduit de l'allemand par Auguste Dietrich"@en
  • "Vyrozhdenīe : psikhopaticheskīi︠a︡ i︠a︡vlenīi︠a︡ v oblasti sovremennoĭ literatury i iskusstva"
  • "Dégénerescence"
  • "Degenerazione"
  • "Degenerazione"@it
  • "Degenerazione : fin de siècle, il misticismo, l'egotismo, il secolo ventesimo"@it
  • "Dégénéscence"
  • "Degenerazione : Fin de siècle-misticismo-L'egotismo- Il secolo ventesimo"@it
  • "Degeneration : tr. from the second edition of the German work"@en
  • "Dégénérescence ... Traduit ... par A. Dietrich"
  • "Vyrozhdenīe"
  • "Degeneration"@en
  • "Degeneration"
  • "Degeneración"@es
  • "Degeneración"
  • "Dégénérscence"
  • "Entartung"
  • "Degeneration tr. from the second edition of the German work"
  • "Vyrozhdenie ; Sovremennye frant︠s︡uzy"

workExample

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