From Library Journal
Hanson (English, Cornell Univ.) examines 19th-century aesthetes who found in the Roman Catholic Church an outlet for artistic and sexual expression. Many writers, such as Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Pater, have been attracted to the improbable mixture of chaste devotion and homoeroticism that exists in the materialistic Church. The perplexing question is: Why are so many homosexuals attracted to Catholic institutions that condemn homosexuality and, as a rule, are not permitted to sublimate? This seduction expresses itself in the decadent writings of the Victorian writers, and Hanson studies these writings of sexual pleasure as an important element of religious experience as well as a source of inspiration for the writers. Scholarly in tone, this is for larger literary collections.?Leo Vincent Kriz, West Des Moines Lib., Ia.Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Romantic writers had found in Christianity a poetic cult of the imagination, an assertion of the spiritual quality of beauty in an age of vulgar materialism. The decadents, a diverse movement of writers, were the climax and exhaustion of this romantic tradition. In their art, they enacted the romance of faith as a protest against the dreariness of modern life. Ellis Hanson teases out two strands--eroticism and aestheticism--that rendered the decadent interest in Catholicism extraordinary. More than any other literary movement, the decadents explored the powerful historical relationship between homoeroticism and Roman Catholicism. Why, throughout history, have so many homosexuals been attracted to Catholic institutions that vociferously condemn homosexuality? This perplexing question is pursued in this elegant and innovative book.

Late-nineteenth-century aesthetes found in the Church a peculiar language that gave them a means of artistic and sexual expression. The brilliant cast of characters that parades through this book includes Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, J.-K. Huysmans, Walter Pater, and Paul Verlaine. Art for these writers was a mystical and erotic experience. In decadent Catholicism we can glimpse the beginnings of a postmodern valorization of perversity and performativity. Catholicism offered both the hysterical symptom and the last hope for paganism amid the dullness of Victorian puritanism and bourgeois materialism.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal