Are the 1880s the greatest literary decade ever?
Nietzsche, Twain, Doyle, Stevenson, Henry James, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Huysmans, de Maupassant, Zola all at the top of their game at the same time.
What unique conditions resulted in such exceptional literary output? Was it really a decadent time? Does decadence precipitate good art?
>What unique conditions resulted in such exceptional literary output?
you werent yet alive and therefore were not able to drag everything down to your pitiful subterranean level, you lackwitted oaf
aristocracy was still around and their wasnt computers for people to fuck around with.
>aristocracy was still around
Pretty much all the writers mentioned were middle-class, most either writing for a living or even having a real job and writing on the side.
>their wasnt
people were able to earn a living without being a peasant
more people were educated
the church pretty much gave up burning people for saying things they didn't like
most Europoor states would still lock people up or chase them to the border for saying things they didn't like, but they let them get away with more stuff than they used to. 1848 put the fear of god into a lot of them.
Books could be printed comparatively cheaply.
there are only three good writers here though...
All those things apply today to an even greater degree, but we don't have any results to show for it...
You're not supposed to say "de" Maupassant, just Maupassant. Also you're not supposed to read him.
pleb detected
good catch m8. you mustv'e done a closer reading of the Maupassant wiki article than most!
Way to throw YA authors under the bus, dude.
Most of what needed to be said was said by 1880
The rest is just wanking
he never said the writers were aristocrats, yo
So do aristocrats have a magical aura that makes good writers? What's the connection? It certainly was not an age of aristocratic patronage.
society was in a genuinely revolutionary period and new ideologies were being freely explored and promulgated.
now society is in deep stagnation, intellectual trends are largely insular and unexciting, and media is flooded with plebs. the current age isn't conducive to the creation of great art.
William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were all born between 1879 and 1888.
Pretty great decade.
projecting
Aristocracy is still around.
The 1590s was the greatest decade for literature. This is undeniable.
>the current age isn't conducive to the creation of great art
Particularly literature, because in the "information age" a lot a people distrust words and ideas and favor seemingly direct, physical experiences that can be related to their own body.
Nah, that would be the 1920's.
I can't believe you people actually believe this shit
Do you have an alternative theory?
Rise of the bourgeois, with still a hint of neo-classical formalism. People rebelled from conventional norms, but still had a sense of aesthetics.
There are at least seven
Stevens is nice, and Eliot does have a few great poems