Cythera regained?

"This is the first comprehensive study of the Rococo Revival in nineteenth-century European literature and the arts. Much has been written and published about the Gothic and Classical, Renaissance and Baroque revival styles, but little more than specialist articles or monographs have dealt with the revival of eighteenth-century Rococo. One reason for its relative critical neglect may be the fact that it is not concentrated in a single country or a single art, in a single period or a single creative artist, but rather dispersed across different arts and cultures, fluctuating in intensity and importance at different times between 1830 and 1910." "The book examines developments in France and Germany, Austria and England, as well as contributions from America and Russia. Its two halves comprise firstly, a thematic account of literary examples of the Rococo Revival organized into perceptual modes: theatrical, oriental, pastoral, and musical.^ The second half is chronological, tracing shifts in cultural ambience between 1830 and 1910 in manageable stages of twenty years each, dealing with different types of phenomena: critical perspectives, the decorative arts, painting, music, and literature." "Initiating each of the perceptual modes, the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) projects an underlying gravity, a sense of transience and duality, and it is these features that mark him off from later Rococo artists, and affect the nineteenth-century's response to Rococo. As one of several historicist styles in an eclectic century, the Rococo Revival alternates between the poles of Aestheticism and Decadence. While its most characteristic mode is that of pastoral, the style manifests itself less in any large-scale architectural achievements, than in the decorative and so-called "minor" arts. Its critical image correspondingly shifts, as it is refracted in turn by Romanticism and Realism, Symbolism and Art Nouveau.^ The rise of Mozart, too, as aesthetic and musical icon, both influences the Rococo Revival, and is in turn quickened by it." "Apart from more familiar instances such as Paul Verlaine's poetic cycle, Fetes Galantes (1869), and the art-historical studies in French XVIII Century Painters (1873-74) by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, the sense of any overarching pattern and aesthetic framework to view individual works of the Rococo Revival has hitherto been lacking. In the poetry, prose, and drama of Gautier and Banville, Morike and Pater, Bierbaum and Hofmannsthal; in silverware and porcelain, furniture and ironwork; in the visual art of Menzel and Monticelli, Beardsley and Somov; in interior decoration at Belvoir Castle and Wrest Park, Potsdam and Karlsbad, the Liechtenstein Palais and Linderhof; in the music of Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and Richard Strauss, the most successful works of the Rococo Revival emerge from an inventive and creative synthesis between past and present.^ The period between 1890 and 1910, indeed, marks the most international and interartistic florescence of the Rococo Revival, signaling a widespread and variegated revival of interest, rather than any accidental coincidence of merely local, isolated, and episodic phenomena." "All readers drawn to the literature, arts, and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and especially to period styles and interartistic relations, will be engaged by this study, which also includes some sixty-nine illustrations together with an index and an extensive bibliography."--Jacket.