Download PDF by Peter Jeffreys: Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy's Imaginary Portraits

During his sojourn in England through the 1870s, a tender Cavafy discovered himself enthralled by means of the cultured circulation of cosmopolitan London. It used to be in the course of those years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, together with Burne-Jones and Whistler, in addition to works of aesthetic writers who have been effecting a revolution in British literary tradition and channeling affects from France that might progressively coalesce into a world decadent stream. In Reframing Decadence Peter Jeffreys returns us to this serious interval of Cavafy's existence, exhibiting the poet's artistic indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impression on his poetry proved to be profound. within the strategy, Jeffreys deals a severe reappraisal of Cavafy’s relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence.

Foremost one of the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy have been the decline of imperial Rome, the increase of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The impact of Walter Pater on Cavafy’s view of classical and late-antique historical past was once sizeable, inflected because it used to be with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy might undertake as his personal, making Pater’s imaginary pix an incredible touchstone for his personal historicizing poetry. Cavafy might stream past Pater to discover a extra overtly homoerotic sensuality yet he by no means rather deserted this wealthy Victorian legacy, person who contributed enormously to his emergence as a world poet. Jeffreys concludes via contemplating Cavafy’s present reputation as a homosexual poet and his curious relation to kitsch as appear in his ongoing attractiveness through translation and visible media.