Degeneration
by Max Nordau
On This Page
Description
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 show more 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." show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
41+ Works 188 Members
Awards and Honors
Distinctions
Classifications
- Genres
- Literature Studies and Criticism, Nonfiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 809.894 — Literature & rhetoric Literature, rhetoric & criticism History, description, critical appraisal of more than two literatures By or for groups of persons
- LCC
- CB417 .N813 — Auxiliary Sciences of History History of Civilization History of Civilization By period
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 112
- Popularity
- 288,834
- Rating
- (3.42)
- Languages
- English, French, German, Italian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 16
- ASINs
- 4
