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Literary Decadence And Critical Decay, Kevin David Beverage

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which literary decadence works against the tendency of literary history, scholarship, and literary institutions to make permanent—to monumentalize—certain styles, names, or movements. It does this through an examination of the role of criticism in decadent texts, and that criticism’s resistance to the “technologies of maintenance” working to guarantee permanence. After examining Oscar Wilde’s notion of criticism as conversational and that which comes before the work of art, thus breaking the permanency of the work of art, I shift to an analysis of two novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. Fitzgerald’s This Side …