Egoists, A Book of Supermen

Egoists, A Book of Supermen is James Huneker‘s bracing gallery of intellectual portraits, devoted to those artists and thinkers who made the self a theatre of revolt: among them Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Huysmans, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Nietzsche. Written in a nervously brilliant, aphoristic style, the book belongs to the fin-de-siècle moment when aestheticism, symbolism, decadence, and philosophical individualism were unsettling Victorian moral certainties. Huneker‘s "supermen" are not merely Nietzschean titans, but creators whose radical temperaments reshaped modern consciousness. Huneker, an American critic of music, art, and literature, was unusually equipped for such a study. Born in Philadelphia and formed by cosmopolitan reading, journalistic discipline, and deep immersion in European culture, he became one of the chief American interpreters of modernism before modernism had a secure name. His sensitivity to Wagner, Chopin, French prose, and post-Romantic rebellion informs the book‘s restless intelligence and its admiration for difficult genius. This volume is recommended to readers interested in the genealogy of modern artistic individualism. It is especially valuable for those who want criticism that is itself literary: passionate, learned, opinionated, and alive to the dangerous glamour of exceptional minds.