A01=Richard Candida Smith
aesthetics
anarchism
aspirations
Author_Richard Candida Smith
canon
Category=AGA
Category=DSB
Category=JBCC9
classic
commercial art
commercial media
creative writing
creativity
dreams
elite culture
epistemology
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
erotic
gender
industrial art
knowledge
labor
language
literary criticism
literary theory
literature
media
metaphysics
nonfiction
poet
poetic form
poetic theory
poetics
poetry
pragmatism
psychology
self representation
semantics
sexual liberation
sexuality
stephane mallarme
symbolism
symbolist movement
symbolist poetry
truth
utopia
utopianism
visions
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780520218284
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 14 Feb 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness. Candida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media.
After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. "Mallarme's Children" traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.
Richard Candida Smith is Director of the Program in American Culture and Associate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (California, 1995).
