The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Monograph |
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| Description | John Stuart Hay contributed to the Uranian canon a biography of the Roman Emperor Elagabalus (Heliogabalus), infamous as the ultimate illustration of the potential and dangers of actualized Decadence. Hay's 1911 "psychobiography" The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus "was attacked on all sides--for its subject and content, for historical inaccuracies and a lack of scholarly rigor, for its style and whiff of perversity, as well as for various instances of overt and easily recognizable plagiarism." Nonetheless, "rather than its historical accuracy (which is often questionable), [what] makes this biography worthy of rejuvenation ... [is that it] has much to say, not only about the late Uranians and their perceptions of pederastic and homoerotic history and the figures who peopled it, but also about the perceptions, or lack of perceptions, of their hetero-normative contemporaries." |