London - Body, mind and the City

Author: Max Nordau

Title: Degeneration (1895)

Keywords:

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Introduction

Max Nordau (1849-1923) was an author, social critic and physician, as well as being a leading Zionist of his era. Degeneration, his most famous work, was published in German in 1892 (translated into English in 1895). It largely consists of a heavily-moralising attack on supposed ‘degeneration’ in art, symptoms of which include mysticism and egomania (Nietzsche, Wagner, Ibsen, Zola and Wilde are all used as examples). The work also rails polemically against the effects of such rising social phenomena of the period as rapid urbanization, and its perceived effects on the human body.

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