Owen Jones and the V&A: Ornament for a Modern Age by Olivia Horsfall Turner (review)

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Julia Skelly (bio) Decadence in the Age of Modernism, edited by Kate Hext and Alex Murray; pp. vii + 304. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $54.95. If not precisely a poisonous book, Decadence in the Age of Modernism does burn with a hard, gem-like flame. Each chapter in Kate Hext and Alex Murray’s edited volume sings voluptuously with illuminating archival research and close readings of both canonical and understudied texts; many of the essays display a self-consciously Decadent style with luscious prose, insightful asides, and Wildean witticisms. Form and content fit beautifully together in this volume that is, if not exactly groundbreaking, then certainly an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Decadent modernisms. Born out of a 2015 conference on “Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism,” this tight collection of eleven essays, in addition to the editors’ introduction, usefully surveys the scholarship on literary Decadence, demonstrating clearly that early twentieth-century modernism did not break so cleanly from Decadence as modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot proposed. Rather, it was a source of both inspiration and anxiety for writers during the age of modernism. The decision by Hext and Murray to frame the volume by those words—“the age of modernism”—rather than “Decadent modernism,” or “Decadence and modernism,” was productively strategic. As they note, not all of the authors discussed in the book fit comfortably into the ideological category of modernist literature. Indeed, while some of the chapters show that a selection [End Page 471] of understudied Decadent novelists and poets deserve the label of modernist, the overall objective of the collection is not to insert new writers into the modernist canon but rather to demonstrate that Decadence and modernism were in close, if tense, conversation in the period from 1895 (the year of Oscar Wilde’s trials) to the First World War. Each chapter in this collection is a pleasure to read. Written in different styles, each essay is elegantly composed, and the book fits (almost) seamlessly together as a whole. The only outlier is Joseph Bristow’s contribution, “‘A Poetess of No Mean Order’: Margaret Sackville, Women’s Poetry, and the Legacy of Aestheticism,” since, as Bristow’s title indicates, Sackville was influenced by literary aestheticism, and roundly rejected Decadence as “a pleasure in dark and doubtful places, a cynicism which looks upon itself with a sad, half-admiring pity” (qtd. in Bristow 99–100) that is enacted through “the babbling of little men” (qtd. in Bristow 100). Nevertheless, a rejection of Decadence is still an engagement with it, and one can understand Hext and Murray’s choice to include Bristow’s essay, particularly as it contributes to the still-understudied work of female aesthetes, and builds on work such as Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades’s groundbreaking edited volume Women and British Aestheticism (1999). Sarah Parker’s chapter, “Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Decadence,” also contributes to the study of female aesthetes, but pays more attention to Decadent themes and forms. All of the other chapters are delectably dedicated to Decadence. Kristin Mahoney’s essay, “Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism,” is crucial reading for feminist scholars concerned with Decadence. Leverson, a staunch defender of Wilde until the very end, was hyper-aware of the misogynistic subtext of literary Decadence, and as Mahoney observes, “Leverson’s relationships with the decadents themselves were as complicated as her relationship to the decadent aesthetic” (30). To my mind, the most important contribution of the entire volume is the repeated revelation of the queerness of Decadence at the fin de siècle, when, as Mahoney remarks, “the turn to decadence had begun to operate as a queer alternative to high modernism” (27). As Hext and Murray explain, “the uneven critical history of the decadent movement has largely been one of recovery since the 1960s . . . and one greatly helped since the late 1980s by the influence of Queer Criticism and Gay Studies” (7). Like Mahoney, Ellis Hanson, Kirsten MacLeod, and Michèle Mendelssohn foreground how early twentieth-century Decadence functioned as an...

Japan entered an age of rapid modernization following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s U.S. navy ships on its shores in the 1850s. It soon became the first Asian nation with a military and industry on par with Western imperialist countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the Japanese grappled with the massive effects of this rapid Western-inspired modernization, they searched for their cultural identity, increasingly turning to China for inspiration. The distinctively modern identity they built through the arts has only recently begun to be examined by researchers and through exhibitions. This book’s essays, by scholars from the United States, Japan, and Europe, look beyond Japan’s Western industrialization to examine China’s role in forming the nation’s modern identity. It follows a retrospective of the Japanese nun, calligrapher, potter, and political activist Ōtagaki Rengetsu (1791–1875) and the modern Japanese painter Tomioka Tessai (1836–1924) on view in late 2022 at the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C.

ABSTRACT‘Second age of modernity’ is a magical password that is meant to open the doors to new conceptual landscapes. The whole world of nation sovereignty is fading away – including the ‘container theory of society’ on which most of the sociology of the first age of modernity is based upon. In this article I propose a distinction between ‘simple globalization’ and ‘reflexive cosmopolitization’. In the paradigm of the first age of modernity, simple globalization is interpreted within the territorial compass of state and politics, society and culture. This involves an additive, not substitutive, conception of globalization as indicated for example by ‘interconnectedness’. In the paradigm of the second age of modernity globalization changes not only the relations between and beyond national states and societies, but also the inner quality of the social and political itself which is indicated by more or less reflexive cosmopolitization as an institutionalized learning process – and its enemies.

In this work, and in line with the attention international researchers have devoted to Heidegger's major works to contribute to the elucidation of his teachings, we intend to establish a hypothesis based on Heidegger's secondary literature in his thought-following his speeches, presentations, lectures, letters, notes, interviews, etc. Thus, the hypothesis of this work aims to prove the foundation of Heidegger's teachings on the Metaphysical Foundations of the Modern Age-specifically, by posing questions on the Essence of Modern Age Science, the Essence of Action in the Modern Age, and the Essence of Technic in the Modern Age. In this context, this essay explores the main phenomena of modernity emphasized by Heidegger in his secondary works to demonstrate the Metaphysical Foundations of the Modern Age and thereby prove the Metaphysical Foundation of the Modern Age's essence of Modern Age science, the essence of action in the Modern Age, and the essence of technic in the Modern Age. The ultimate goal is to synthesize fragments from various Heideggerian works of secondary literature to point out, in one place, what Heidegger taught at a higher level in his major works: how the Modern Age, in all its fundamental phenomena and in the entirety of its richness/deficiencies, delivers its foundations within Modern Age Metaphysics.

the domain of Art critique and becoming a philosophical argument. How can we think of Perspective as symbolic Form? Is Perspective really a symbolic form? Why is Perspective so important? Because at the beginning of the Modern Age, Perspective as spiritual figure grounds many symbolic or even many scientific constructions. We could we say that perspective open the foundation of modern science as such. The “Geometrization” of Vision, beginning with perspective, will be for us the interpretative key in order to understand the Modern Age as a whole. This understanding will allow us to understand the anthropologic dimension arising from the Modern Age, called „Perspectivism“. Assuming that perspective was neither only an invention of painting nor of geometry nor of philosophy, taken as singular fields of human inquiry, we will try to sketch the genesis of “perspective” from an interdisciplinary point of view. By doing so, we will also try to fix its deep significance for the anthropology of the Modern Age. Living and feeling in a perspectival world is the real invention of the Modern Age, one that overcame the closed Cosmos of the Middle Ages in order to reveal to mankind its own potential. Our interdisciplinary approach will proceed from many points of view (history of art, science, theology, anthropology) and converge on the idea of a new kind of human experience. Such an interdisciplinary approach will open new questions about our present time. Are we justified in thinking of our experience today as perspectival? What does it mean today to think from perspectives in the manifold dimensions of our living and to face to the complexity of our times?

When I compare the town in Middle Ages with that of Modern Ages, I found a pretty remarkable difference in quality between the former and the latter, although both are towns under feudlism. In my article, I go through the process of changes from the Middle Ages to the Modern Ages, from the viewpoint of prospect of towns.How many towns were there? How were they scattered? The towns in Middle Ages were rather few. They were 500 and so. On the other hand, in the Modern Ages. I found much more towns-nearly 4.000, most of which came into existence in the Modern Ages.It is remarkable that the towns in the Middle Ages generally enlarged to grow into those in the Middle Ages and many of those which were formed in the Modern Ages also lay their foundation in the former ages.The characteristic of the towns in the Middle Ages is that of some villages, some farm villages which scattered about. The military, industry and commerce, each of those three was on its way to separate from agriculture, and the social division of labour between the towns and the villages had not been completed on the contrary, in the Modern Ages, the towns were completely separated from the villages. The city, where the military class and commercial class live, is quite different from the villages, a dwelling place for the agricultural class. Accordingly the towns changed into a large, single group consisting of many houses that are in close order. This changes was inclined to be hastened through the agreement or the planned construcion of towns of “Daimyo-Lord” in the Modern Ages.The rapid increase of population is the most distinct characteristic of the towns in the Modern Ages. This phenomenon was brought about as many people removed from the farm-villages to the towns from the latter half of the 16th century. In this process, “Ji Samurai”-who lived in the village, the landowner and merchant became “Samurai”-who lived in the town, or upper class merchants in the town, and many of middle and lower class farmers, common tradesmen or artisan.To make a long article short, the town in the Middle Ages, which had character of community connected with the land, changed and grew into the towns in Modern Ages, modern society in which gainning profit and making the most proffessional ability are fundamental.

The Enlightenment philosophy, inspired by the intellectual movements of the Renaissance and Reformation, emerging from the scholastic darkness of the Middle Ages, led to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution with its strong light; With the great acceleration given by the production, it has become the dominant ideology of science, culture and art by spreading first to Europe and then to the whole world. Modernism, which was shaped by the idea of Enlightenment, transformed into capitalism in a short time and caused the formation of a consumption culture. The enlightenment ideology brought the understanding of "objective reason" and "progressive history" to humanity, which transformed it into a consumer society shaped by capitalism instead of the "promised paradise". This is why the 'Age of Modernity' is called the age of capitalist transformation. The spread of capitalism to the whole world has been achieved through mass communication and production techniques. TVs, which are the broadcasting organs of capitalism, have become the main tool of capital transformation and have ensured the spread of consumption culture with advertising and marketing techniques. Modernism has carried the material, thinking and comprehension stages of art to a materialistic dimension within a structure that is far from emotional, formed by a technocentric and mechanical mentality. Art integrated with technology has become commodified with capitalist regulation and institutionalization; has gained a commercial dimension. Pop Art, which emerged in the 1960s, has become the symbol of commercialized art; It has emerged as an art movement that deals with the consumption society and its values. Andy Warhol, the famous representative of Pop Art, is one of the artists known to play a role in the commodification of works of art. Warhol's art has made serious contributions to the process of transforming today's art into commodity aesthetics. Meta art/aesthetics is a tradeable world of copies. This artificial world has turned into the real world in the consumer society, which can be reproduced in line with the possibilities of art production technologies; They have become objects of consumption whose uniqueness has been lost. Keywords: Art, Consumption Culture, Commercialization, Kitsch, Andy Warhol

The Modern Age examines the discourses that have come to characterize adolescence and argues that commonplace views of adolescents as impulsive, conflicted, and rebellious are constructions inspired by broader cultural anxieties that characterized American society in early-20th-century America.The idea of adolescence, argues Kent Baxter, came into being because it fulfilled specific historical and cultural needs: to define a quickly expanding segment of the population, and to express concerns associated with the movement into a new era. Adolescence - a term that had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses thereafter - is a 'modern age' not only because it sprung from changes in American society that are synonymous with modernity, but also because it came to represent all that was threatening about 'modern life'.Baxter provides a preliminary history of adolescence, focusing specifically on changes in the American educational system and the creation of the juvenile justice system that carved out a developmental space between the child and the adult. He looks at the psychological works of G. Stanley Hall and the anthropological works of Margaret Mead and explores what might have inspired their markedly negative descriptions of this new demographic. He examines the rise of the Woodcraft Indian youth movement and its promotion of 'red skin' values while also studying the proliferation of off-reservation boarding schools for Native American youth, where educators attempted to eradicate the very 'red skin' values promoted by the Woodcraft movement.Finally Baxter studies reading at the turn of the century, focusing specifically on Horatio Alger (the Ragged Dick series) and Edward Stratemeyer (the Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, and Hardy Boys series) and what those works reveal about the 'problem' of adolescence and its solutions in terms of values, both economic and moral.

The incidence of dental diseases would be expected to rise as frequency of tooth to denture base discrepancy becomes higher, because the discrepancy seems to have pathogenetic influence on malocclusion, dental caries, and other related disorders. By studying incidence and seriousness of dental diseases in each historic age, therefore, it may be possible to obtain pathogenetic information on dental caries, to estimate the degree and extent of reduction of human dentition, and even to discuss evolution and civilization.From this point of view, we have already reported on dental caries and some other diseases in Japanese remains from the Kamakura era, and conclusively pointed out that the degree of the discrepancy was not so dominant in that era as in the modern age, but it seemed firmly to exsist, with pathogenetic influence on dental caries. In the present paper, incidence and specificity of dental caries, and occlusal and proximal attritions observed in Japanese remains from the later Jomon period are reported. We also discuss the degree and extent of the discrepancy, its pathogenetic role in dental caries, and the food and eating behavior in comparison with those in the Kamakura and modern ages.The materials used were 89 maxillae and 102 mandibles with permanent or mixed dentition, selected from 327 Japanese skulls mostly from the later Jomon period, stored in the University Museum, The University of Tokyo.The frequency of dental caries in the Jomon period was almost the same as in the Kamakura era, but much lower than in the modern age. However, its seriousness was much worse than in the Kamakura era, and almost the same as in the modern age, as indicated from the fact that the carious teeth are distributed more frequently in C3 and C4 than in C1 and C2.The pathogenetic pattern of dental caries in the Jomon period is different from that in the Kamakura era and in the modern age in the following points. 1. The distribution of carious teeth is biased towards the posterior teeth, but not so dominantly as in the Kamakura era. 2. Carious teeth are distributed even in the anterior region. 3. The rate of carious teeth for the third molar does not exceed that for the first molar in both maxilla and mandible. From these facts, the dental caries in the later Jomon period seems to be of environmental pollution type, while it is of the discrepancy type in the Kamakura era and of a combination type in the modern age.

Laments about the decline of public morality and the public service ethos have found expression from across the political spectrum. The age of modernity (or post-modernism) makes more difficult, though by no means impossible, the maintenance of a civil society in which ‘virtue’ and ‘trust’. feed the public service ethos. Indeed modernity has greater need for civil society, virtue and trust at exactly the same time as their stock are receding. Governments have, among other things, applied indiscriminately the ‘heavy’ regulatory regimes necessary to deal with impropriety, in the process stifling the public service ethos. Virtue cannot be commanded; trust is an elusive ‘commodity’. Neither can be secured by administrative fiat, though government can help to create conditions conducive to their nourishment - or, more decisively, stifle their growth. Heavier regulatory regimes and more elaborate codes are understandable and perhaps rational responses to malfunctioning but, if pressed too far, become counterproductive. There should be a retreat from the excesses of ‘management by numbers’. Leadership remains important but, in the age of modernity, no longer suffices as the talisman. There must be greater emphasis upon citizenship.

This paper titled as "The Role of Luang Pu Tuad Amulets as a Source of Mental Comfort in Thai Society in the Age of Modernization" is the study on the relations between the religious institution (Buddhism) and its member (Buddhist laymen) as a result of the belief in sacred power, focusing on the power of Luang-Pu-Tuad amulets in contemporary Thai society. The study aims to 1) investigate the status of Luang-Pu-Tuad as a ‘holy man’ with ‘sacred power’, 2) investigate the pattern of transferring the ‘sacred power’ of Luang-Pu-Tuad into an object 3) analyze how the ‘potencies’ of the amulets respond to the needs of various individuals in contemporary Thai society. The study found that, since the period of King Rama IV, Thailand was affected by contacts with the Western Powers. The excavation of ancient amulets and mass amulet production by monks affected the religious structure in Thailand as amulet is then personally used to provide mental comfort. This trend continues up to the present. With the relation with the US power, through the proliferation of Capitalist principles, the notion of commodity was growing in Thai amulet market. The case of Luang-Pu-Tuad amulet is an exceptional case to represent such phenomenon. The belief is prevalent in Southern Thai society since Ayutthaya period, but the belief was not objectified for mass amulet production until the year of 2497 BE. in Wat-Chang-Hai, Pattani, by Luang-Pu-Tim, the monk who, under the emphasis on the sacred power, connected the local myth and recreate a new set of myth about the spirit of Luang-Pu-Tuad with a religious ritual (Phutthaphisek) for amulet production. However, the belief in Luang-Pu-Tuad amulet was not yet diffused in other regions due to the control on local popular figures in that period. Luang-Pu-Tuad amulet, in its early stage, was popular in the South, especially among the commoners, medical professionals, and the security agents. It was not until the year of 2530 when there was the rise of the middle-class, creating a new set of mental insecurities, which was the reason why there was a rise in the belief about the power for wealth and opportunities. The belief in the power for security was still prevalent, but there was also the rise about the stories regarding how Luang-Pu-Tuad amulets were used to provide mental comfort among the middle-class, leading to further productions and reproductions of Luang-Pu-Tuad amulets in Southern and Central Thailand.

The modern age is such an era of time and space compressed. The central axis having compressed the time of the modern Busan city was the very trains and trams. The development of the means of modern transportation, such as trans and trams, came to change the time-space characteristics of cities in the modern age. Through trains and trams regarded as symbols of modern cities, this study attempted to find the localities of Busan as a modern city. The development of the modern Busan city was actually based on modernity and colonial exploitation. Documents of localities provide data to read humans' local-related experiences. 'Documenting localities' related to the means of modern transportation is a work process to read the localities of Busan in the modern age. Through this process, it is possible to understand how means of transportation can be correlated with a local community, local residents' daily lives and spatial change. Overall, this study is such a small attempt for this concern.

Trans-Global Punk Scenes - The Punk Reader Volume 2; Critical engagement with local, national and trans-global contemporary punk scenes across countries and regions including New Zealand, Indonesia, South Africa, Siberia and the Philippines. Includes thematic discussions on the evolution and adaptation of subcultural styles, punk demographics and the notion of punk identity. 50 b/w illus.

The Marx-Hegel relationship: revisionist interpretations

As soon as 'modernity' was defined as a particular way of con ceiving of time (the so-called 'time of modernity'), the questions of tempo rality came to be situated at the heart of the ongoing debate regarding the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the 'modern age'. This has, in turn, readily led to a no less passionate search for the assessment of modernity's foundations which are thought to rest in its typical sense of experiencing temporality. This polemic instance, however, involves polarized perspectives (from both sides) and the consequent risk, always present in dichotomous approaches, of oversimplifying the concepts at stake and smoothing over the intricacies of their history and meaning. Does there really exist something like a 'time of modernity'? This is the central question that the present article examines. 1