Three Hundred Years of Decadence - (Jules and Frances Landry Award) by Robert Azzarello (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

New Orleans's reputation as a decadent city stems in part from its environmental precariousness, its Francophilia, its Afro-Caribbean connections, its Catholicism, and its litany of alleged "vices," encompassing prostitution, miscegenation, homosexuality, and any number of the seven deadly sins. An evocative work of cultural criticism, Robert Azzarello's Three Hundred Years of Decadence argues that decadence can convey a more nuanced meaning than simple decay or decline conceived in physical, social, or moral terms. Instead, within New Orleans literature, decadence possesses a complex, even paradoxical relationship with concepts like beauty and health, progress, and technological advance.

Azzarello presents the concept of decadence, along with its perception and the uneasy social relations that result, as a suggestive avenue for decoding the long, shifting story of New Orleans and its position in the transatlantic world. By analyzing literary works that span from the late seventeenth century to contemporary speculations about the city's future, Azzarello uncovers how decadence often names a transfiguration of values, in which ideas about supposed good and bad cannot maintain their stability and end up morphing into one another. These evolving representations of a decadent New Orleans, which Azzarello traces with attention to both details of local history and insights from critical theory, reveal the extent to which the city functions as a contact zone for peoples and cultures from Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Drawing on a deep and understudied archive of New Orleans literature, Azzarello considers texts from multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama, song, and travel writing), including many written in languages other than English. His analysis includes such works of transcription and translation as George Washington Cable's "Creole Slave Songs" and Mary Haas's Tunica Texts, which he places in dialogue with canonical and recent works about the city, as well as with neglected texts like Ludwig von Reizenstein's German-language serial The Mysteries of New Orleans and Charles Chesnutt's novel Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

With its careful analysis and focused scope, Three Hundred Years of Decadence uncovers the immense significance--historically, politically, and aesthetically--that literary imaginings of a decadent New Orleans hold for understanding the city's position as a multicultural, transatlantic contact zone.

Review Quotes

Azzarello's theoretically-informed lens of 'decadence' affords fresh perspectives on the significance of New Orleans in American literary history. Crossing genres, languages, centuries and continents, Azzarello posits rich trans-Atlantic contexts for familiar writers like Cable, Dunbar-Nelson, Welty and Komunyaaka, shaped by insightful readings of lesser-known works like Atala, Reizenstein's Mysteries of New Orleans or Moira Crone's The Not Yet. In these pages, Louisiana's 'decadent' and apocalyptic terrain portends a future--and a past--that we can barely bear to know.--Barbara Ewell, coeditor of Sweet Spots: In-between Spaces in New Orleans

Decadence in New Orleans literature has often been confined to portrayals of sex and debauchery, but in Three Hundred Years of Decadence: New Orleans Literature and the Transatlantic World, Robert Azzarello's fresh approach, through his exhaustive research and brilliant analysis, includes climate, geography, race, religion, and more. I have written about New Orleans literature for decades, and if I had to recommend one book about the city's literary history, right now, it would be this one.--Nancy Dixon, editor of N.O. Lit: 200 Years of New Orleans Literature

Offering a timely, crucial, and utterly intriguing perspective on the decadence of New Orleans, Robert Azzarello takes seriously the uneasy connections of decay and fecundity that have shaped the city's literature from pre-colonial times to its fragile present moment. Read this extraordinary book and you will begin to understand the literature of a city that finds its most valuable resources in social deviance and structural decay, and why such a paradox should matter so much to everyone in our troubled times.--Ruth Salvaggio, author of Hearing Sappho in New Orleans

Spellbound by New Orleans, Robert Azzarello summons up a sweeping and powerful reflection on the mythical, literary, and cultural heritage of one of the world's most fabled and seemingly exceptional cities. Passing texts, histories, ecologies and cultures through the multi-faceted prism of 'decadence, ' he reveals three centuries of an imaginative universe that has profound relevance to our past, our present and our future. Critically sophisticated, provocative, and entertaining, this study will reverberate for years to come.--John Lowe, author of Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature

About the Author

Robert Azzarello, associate professor of English at Southern University at New Orleans, is the author of Queer Environmentality: Ecology, Evolution, and Sexuality in American Literature.