The era of the early twenty-first century feels like a time of political and cultural dissolution. Rent with appeals to emotion rather than reason, and a permeating sense of unease and insecurity, the apparent certainties of the later twentieth century now feel like a distant, nearly lost memory.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the fin de siècle, there was also a great sense of unease. Following rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, that had upended centuries of cultural norms, Europe began to feel the presence of a decay and decadence that would lead to dissolution.
As author Jessica Wood details, it was at this time scholars and artists finally turned their attention to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Scorned by his contemporaries during his working life, it was only once he had suffered a complete mental collapse that his ideas eventually found an audience. For Nietzsche believed that in order for there to be a cultural renaissance there had to be a revival of the Dionysian. Within, he argued, was the essence of the greatness of Ancient Greece, and the capacity to revive the decadent culture of his time.
Among others, figures like Gabriele d’Annunzio and Thomas Mann took up Nietzsche’s call to look for the creative power within the Dionysian. But as this book details, while it has the capacity to create, it can also have the capacity to entrap and destroy – for within the Dionysian there is also the abyss and oblivion.
With a foreword by Professor David Barclay, Nietzsche, Dionysus & Oblivion takes the reader on a journey through the fin de siècle and into the twentieth century, with an intense focus on the nature of Nietzsche’s ideas and the influence they wrought in the fields of art, scholarship and power. An influence that remains with us to this day, and we need to be on alert, for both its dual capacity to work for good and for evil.
Format
Print:
First Edition, September 2026
A5 72 pages
© 2026 Ueberschwarz Pty Ltd
ISBN 978-1-922686-17-6