Nordic Devotions: Gothic Art as Erotic Affect : ― J.- K. Huysmans’s and Maurice Barrès’s Decadent Devotio Moderns
- Submitting institution
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Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19395565
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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- Book title
- Nordic Literature of Decadence
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780429655425
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This 7,000 word book chapter explores key ways in which a developed fin-de-siècle interest in Gothic art and its sites become pivotal to an expanded decadent vision and sensibility. These innovations reverberated in an extended Nordic engagement with Gothic artistic and cultural heritage as a trigger for an emotional response to Gothic patrimony, in particular, with an erotics of affect with determinant broader cultural and political resonances for tournant-de-siècle culture. The chapter thus situates a new relationship between Nordic so-called modernisms and Gothic art. Further, it argues this convergence as inflected by a pervasive, yet to date unexplored reception and transmission of late nineteenth-century Parisian modernity to new Nordic art contexts. Under scrutiny is J.-K. Huysmans’s invocation of the Gothic so-called ‘primitive’ artist, echoed in two developed Nordic responses to Huysmans’s ideas, August Strindberg’s and Johannes Jørgensen’, connecting the figure of an intertwined Nordic and Gothic Latinate ‘barbare’ with an unseen modernity and agency. The research sheds new light on pivotal ways in which medieval, in particular Gothic, visual culture emerges as a touchstone for new artist identities and cultural alterities at the ‘fin de siècle’ in Nordic contexts (many, practically unknown to Anglophone audiences), differencing nationalist constructs of art to shape alternative constructs of ‘belonging’ and cultural modernity.
The chapter was first presented at the 'End Games and Emotions in Visual and Literary Cultures', University of Helsinki-University of Tallinn (August 2017). It was selected subsequently by double-blind peer-review as one of fifteen papers by world-leading scholars of Decadence to be included in the international, multi-author book, Nordic Literature of Decadence: the developed outcome of the interdisciplinary ERC-HERA-funded project on 'World Cultures and Emotions'.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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