Awards

• Short-listed for The TaPRA David Bradby Monograph Prize 2024 (UK)

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9781350237087

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"""Staging Decadence convincingly illustrates how, amid the frenzy, stagnation, and relentless productivism of present-day capitalism, artists and performers take pleasure in the ruin and waste and, far from escaping the material conditions of the modern world, imagine their way to alternatives. Alston vividly demonstrates how decadence is embodied--exuberantly, lavishly, grotesquely, wastefully, weirdly, queerly -- on the stage, in live performance, and in the work of a kaleidoscopic array of artists. No work of scholarship better demonstrates the urgency of contemporary decadence studies and will speak to multiple audiences in theatre, performance, disability studies, literature and art. Alston shows us what it is to live and breathe along with the artists whose work he so carefully illuminates. As it explores the counter-pleasures offered by contemporary decadent performance, Staging Decadence is as pleasurable and exciting to read as it is intelligent in its critique of twenty-first century capital."" --Robert Stilling, author of Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry"

Staging Decadence convincingly illustrates how, amid the frenzy, stagnation, and relentless productivism of present-day capitalism, artists and performers take pleasure in the ruin and waste and, far from escaping the material conditions of the modern world, imagine their way to alternatives. Alston vividly demonstrates how decadence is embodied--exuberantly, lavishly, grotesquely, wastefully, weirdly, queerly -- on the stage, in live performance, and in the work of a kaleidoscopic array of artists. No work of scholarship better demonstrates the urgency of contemporary decadence studies and will speak to multiple audiences in theatre, performance, disability studies, literature and art. Alston shows us what it is to live and breathe along with the artists whose work he so carefully illuminates. As it explores the counter-pleasures offered by contemporary decadent performance, Staging Decadence is as pleasurable and exciting to read as it is intelligent in its critique of twenty-first century capital. * Robert Stilling, author of Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry *

Author Information

Adam Alston is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Theatre at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. He is the co-editor of Decadent Plays, 1890-1930 (Bloomsbury, 2024), co-editor of a special issue of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies on ‘Decadence and Performance’ (Winter 2021), and he runs the AHRC-funded Staging Decadence project. He has also published extensively on immersive theatre.

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