Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle

Publisher Marketing: The eleven stories in The Decline of Our Neighborhood provide further proof that Robert Wexelblatt is a writer of uncommon intelligence and verve. Unusual characters in strange circumstances struggle here for meaning and vision. Glnin, a writer, suddenly finds himself president of an unnamed republic. Katy Moffit, sometime comic and smart alec, takes on the sleepy town of Benton, Indiana. Appearances are also made by Ishl Teitelbaum, the Savior; "the famous courtesan Lucina, " who visits the hermit Arnaud and falls in love; the Alpha Company Artists' Collaborative; Isaac Fehderflos, a well-known violinist, and improbably a second Isaac Fehderflos, who is not a violinist; and the astonishing Olmaler, painter in oils, better known as O'Malley, who does not want to live if he cannot paint - and means it. As always, Wexelblatt's stories are about both language and people. They enter the consciousness of the reader in surprising and moving ways. Readers who have not encountered Robert Wexelblatt's work are in for a treat. Those who already know him will be eager to see what's new in his delightful universe. Publisher Marketing: At the turn of the century, short stories by--and often about--New Women flooded the pages English and American magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, and the Yellow Book. This daring new fiction, often innovative in form and courageous in its candid representations of female sexuality, marital discontent, and feminist protest, shocked Victorian critics, who denounced the authors as literary degenerates or erotomaniacs. This collection brings together twenty of the most original and important stories from this period. The writers included in this highly readable volume are Kate Chopin, Victoria Cross, George Egerton, Julia Constance Fletcher, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sarah Grand, Vernon Lee, Ada Leverson, Charlotte Mew, Olive Schreiner, Edith Wharton, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Mabel E. Wotton. As Elaine Showalter shows in her introduction, the short fiction of the Fin-de-Siecle is the missing link between the Golden Age of Victorian women writers and the new era of feminist modernism. Elaine Showalter is a professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of A Literature of Their Own, The Female Malady, and other books, and editor of Alternative Alcott, a volume in the American Women Writers Series (Rutgers University Press).

Contributor Bio:  Showalter, Elaine Elaine Showalter is Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of "Sister' Choice: Traditions & Contradictions in American Women's Writing, The Female Malady: Women, Madness & English Culture, Sexual Anarchy: Gender & Culture at the Fin de Siecle", and "Modern American Women Writers".