Parnassianism

Noun

Parnassianism (uncountable)

1. A French literary style which began during the positivist period of the 19th century.
   • The leading poets of Parnassianism, like Machado, were utterly respectable and middle classs, good family men; many were bureaucrats, and they were proud that they had freed poets from "the obligation to wear their hair long" (Bilac, in Broca, 1960:7). Symbolism was enormously influential in almost...1983, David T. Haberly, Three Sad Races: Racial Identity and National Consciousness in Brazilian Literature, Cambridge University Press, page 100
   • The autonomy of art, the distaste for the bourgeois world, the heightening of artifice, the affinity for sculpture and architecture, the use of exotic imagery in an objective way— all these are general elements of Parnassianism that seem to have found their way into Salammbô.1995, David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, University of Massachusetts Press, page 36