Nicoletta Pireddu. Antropologi alla corte della bellezza. Decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle. Verona: Fiorini, 2002.
This volume -- the recipient of the 2003 American Association for Italian Studies Book Award -- examines the relationships between decadent literature and anthropology in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe, studying the unnoticed connection between a purposeless, ephemeral beauty, and the disinterestedness ascribed by anthropologists to the ceremonial expenditure of “primitive” civilizations. In those two apparently opposed discourses, prodigality and uselessness challenge the Western cult of profit by working in two directions: beauty is a form of lavishness, and lavishness is a source of beauty. An innovative theoretical and cultural framework at the crossroads of aesthetics, anthropology, and philosophy reexamines the works of O. Wilde, G. D’Annunzio, and J.-K. Huysmans, and claims the crucial role of neglected intellectuals like Paolo Mantegazza and Vernon Lee in the emergence of a proto-theorization of gift-exchange.
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