Richard Gilman Poradie kníh

Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre. And here are seven of his very best. "One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."—The New Yorker "The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, [he] is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society."—New York Magazine "If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard."—Time "Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage."—Marsha Norman, Pulitzer prizewinning author of ‘Night, Mother. "One of our best and most challenging playwrights...his plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape."—Newsweek "His plays are stunning in thier originality, defiant and inscrutable."—Esquire "Sam Shepard is phenomenal..the best practicing American playwright."—The New Republic

What exactly did and does this pervasive word, decadence, mean? For several centuries at least, it was used to characterize conditions if decline; most notably, the corruption, probably Oriental in origin, that ostensibly led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Associated with it were flabbiness, luxury, sensuality, a loss of nerve and skill - and, contradictory, excessive concern with formal perfection at the expense of content. But it is only a little over a hundred years ago that the first person (Baudelaire) was called (by Gautier) decadent. It was in mid-nineteenth-century France, in the reaction to the triumph of the idea of progress and its associated bourgeois smugness and optimism, that decadence, as a posture proudly denying normal ethical and aesthetic standards, came to the fore. Soon it reached the England of Swinburne, Wilde, and Beardsley and eventually came to be attached to such disparate phenomena as the Wiemar Republic and Nazism, l'art pour l'art and punk rock. Richard Gilman, one of our most respected critics, here undertakes to demonstrate that this ubiquitous word may be nothing but a vessel of ambiguity and imprecision, a freelance epithet, as he calls it. The result is not only a fascinating linguistic exploration but also a study in permutations of belief, a first-rate piece of literary criticism, and an illuminating essay in cultural history.