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The Child of PleasureDownload Now...

by Gabriele D'Annunzio (Author) , Georgina Harding (Translator) , Ernest Boyd (Commentator) , Arthur Symons (Translator)

Text Source:

Text URL:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20015

Language:

Type:

E-book

Description:

Not available

Table of Contents:

Not available

Amazon.com Information:

Sales Rank:

1648105

ISBN:

1595690581

Page Count:

212

Detail Page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595690581

Download this text: The Child of Pleasure

Customer Review: When in Rome...read this book

D'Annuzio gives us the intimate details of the decadent lifestyle of a ne'er-do-well Roman count and his social class. The facts of the story could be told in a few sentences, but (like his contemporary Henry James) its the way he tells the story not the story itself that is the most appealing. His descriptions of Rome and the country villas of the rich make it a great book to take on a trip to Italy.

Product Description

The Child of Pleasure (written in 1888 and published in 1889) and its protagonist Andrea Sperelli introduced the Italian culture of the late 1800s to Aestheticism and a taste for decadence. Sperelli is a young count, who - like Joris Karl Huysmans' Baron Des Esseintes or Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray - following family tradition, seeks beauty and despises the bourgeois world; leads an extraordinary life, which he lives as a work of art; and rejects the basic rules of morality and social interaction. However, this extraordinary sensitivity also implies a certain corruption, evident in his sadistic superimposing of the two women: Elena Muti and Maria Ferres.

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