BOOK REVIEW: ROXANA PATRAȘ, “CÂNTECE DINAINTEA DECADENȚEI. A.C. SWINBURNE ȘI DECLINUL OCCIDENTULUI”. IASI, TIMPUL, 2012, 302 P.

Abstract

In a period marked by conflicting impulses, a deepening sense of doubt and the overwhelming experience of transition, as the nineteenth century came to be known, the lives of numerous literary and cultural figureheads were tied to controversy and scandal, either through circumstance or by personal choice. Within the gallery of Victorian writers, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), described by many as the last of the romantics and a centrepiece among the decadents, is second perhaps only to Oscar Wilde when it comes to the magnitude of the waves created in the public sphere by the vagaries characterising flamboyant and non-conformist spirits. An almost inexorable source of speculations (did he, or did he not eat a monkey after all, as he once had claimed?) and a common target of elitist and puritan disdain, Swinburne is one of the artists whose reception and fame has inevitably been marked by the continuous blurring of the border between myth and reality, persona and person.