Recent scholars have been captivated by the indeterminate potentialities that decadence sets not in contradiction to, but in disarming misstep with, Victorian claims of individual, social, and global systems operating harmoniously toward a singular order. These systems also happened to privilege the aspirations of the middle class, the patriarchal machinery, white British colonial expansionism, and anthropocentric privilege. In a scene in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Oscar Wilde offers a particularly pithy encapsulation of this effective obliqueness and extensibility of decadence in relation to cultural norms. The character Algernon enters the room and, on seeing his endearing cousin Gwendolen, offers the complement, “Dear me, you are smart,” to which she replies, “I am always smart!” The retort's brash overconfidence is diluted by the sense that Gwendolen perhaps misunderstood what Algernon meant; he was complementing her looks, but she may have thought he was referring to her intellect. If so, then she is clearly not as sharp as she claims. But even if she did understand him and was, like him, referring to her appearance, the comment is destabilizing; it renders flat Algernon's attempt to complement her as particularly appealing at this particular moment. Either way, her response is somehow off. And when her suitor Jack follows up this bit of banter by declaring Gwendolen “quite perfect,” she again rebuffs the complement: “Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.” The humor arises because of Gwendolen charmingly construing the conventional for the philosophical, her seeming inability quite to understand what others mean, her way of taking a simple compliment and scaling it up almost to the level of the epistemological or metaphysical.

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).

Focusing on Vernon Lee's and Algernon Blackwood's portrayals of forests, this article argues that decadent ecology questions the privileging of humans over other sentient beings in relation to the moral conscriptions intending to channel attachments and desires toward productivist purposes. It addresses the ways in which these authors undermine human assumptions of self-control and managerial authority by encouraging an opening up to the affective communications of ecosystems. Raising questions central to eco-studies in general, Lee's and Blackwood's works challenge ideas of human communicative superiority and extensionism through representations of humility, trepidatious veneration, and a sense of the imagination as a potential channel for affection across species.

The graphic designer Aubrey Beardsley created perverse, grotesque illustrations that encapsulate our sense of decadent visuality. This essay explores Beardsley's use of foreign styles, specifically those of nineteenth-century Japan and eighteenth-century France. Looking at Beardsley's illustrations for Salomé (1893) and The Rape of the Lock (1895), the essay argues that the Japanese and French stylistic influences are actually connected, despite their diverse geographies and temporalities. Studying both styles together reveals the ways that decadence embraced hierarchy and the inequality of persons, wielding a surprisingly normative politics of racial and cultural otherness to produce a Victorian counterculture. Decadence harnessed these familiar imperial-era attitudes in strange ways, using models of taboo difference to create a transgressive aesthetics that moved toward both embodiment and abstraction.

At the core of literary decadence is a conflicted relationship with modernity. For some decadent writers, the onset of rapid social and technological change could usher in possibilities for living and loving in hitherto unimagined ways, yet for others of a more conservative hue, modernization was to be rejected, tradition embraced. This essay argues that experience can be used as a framework for articulating these very different forms of decadence. The essay begins with an exploration of aesthetic modernity as an attempt to articulate the shock of the new, whereby the experience (present) or sensation becomes the ground for the erosion of collective tradition (experience past). Decadent and aestheticist writers such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde embraced these new experiences, rejecting the “fruits of experience” as a ground for knowledge. In contradistinction to this valorization of sensation, I examine the “conservative” decadent aesthetic of Lionel Johnson and Michael Field. These writers’ embrace of nostalgia and jingoistic nationalism, I argue, demands we expand our current critical frameworks to more fully encompass the politics of decadence.

This article considers the Victorian and Edwardian vogue for setting late-Victorian decadent poetry to music. It examines the particular appeal of Ernest Dowson's and Arthur Symons's verse to the composers Cyril Scott and Frederick Delius, whose Songs of Sunset (1911) was regarded as the “quintessential expression of the fin-de-siècle spirit,” and discusses the contribution of women composers and musicians—particularly that of the Irish composer and translator Adela Maddison (1866–1929)—to the cross-continental tradition of decadent song literature and the musical legacy of decadence in the late-Victorian period and beyond.

This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagination and cinematic horror. It sketches the inherently cinematic qualities in decadent writing and, focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), offers a new reading of how it incorporates different cinematic technologies to create a sense of supernatural horror. The essay goes on to examine how Wilde's novel inspired early American horror films, with close analysis of how its dialogue and visual effects were incorporated into the genre-defining adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde (1920).

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

When Basil Hallward discovers the distorted portrait of Dorian Gray in chapter 13 of Wilde's eponymous novel, he first ascribes the changes to “some wretched mineral poison” in his paints. Although the passage corresponds to the climax of the story, it has rarely been discussed from a chromatic perspective. And yet, color mattered to Wilde as well as to many of his decadent friends. Drawing on the canonical text of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which it revisits from a color perspective, this article explores the literary inscription of new, shifting chromatic materialities in order to shed light on what Théophile Gautier, in his seminal 1868 essay on Baudelaire, defined as the decadent “palette”: “veined with the greenness (verdeurs) of decomposition.”

This article explores the extreme type of decadent eroticism that Aleister Crowley developed while an undergraduate at Cambridge in the later 1890s. The discussion focuses of Crowley's desire to appear as the main legatee of Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry from the 1860s and 1870s. Especially significant here is Crowley's volume White Stains, which the maverick publisher Leonard Smithers issued in a privately circulated edition in 1898. In the 1920s, Crowley acknowledged that his sexual affair with Herbert Charles (“Jerome”) Pollitt was largely responsible for introducing him to the works of English and French decadent writers. Pollitt—who gained celebrity as an aesthete, art collector, and drag artist in fin de siècle Cambridge—became the major patron of Aubrey Beardsley. In 1910 Crowley acknowledged the legacy of Pollitt's decadent influence into the two concluding faux-ghazals that appear in The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which is in part modeled upon Richard Burton's translation of The Perfumed Garden (1886), based on the fifteenth-century heteroerotic manual by Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nefzawi. This 1910 volume, which celebrates sodomy through the voice of an imaginary seventeenth-century Persian poet, belongs to Crowley's established interest in taboo forms of erotic experience that relate to the occult rituals he practiced in relation to sex magick.

Literary decadence played an active role in promoting the increased circulation and critical scrutiny of literary translations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Building on Walter Benjamin's influential definition of translation as an autonomous literary form, this article examines Walter Pater's “Style” (1888) and Lafcadio Hearn's 1910 translation of Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) in order to map a theory and practice of decadent translation founded on the aesthetic and ethical respect for the foreignness of the original. Paying closer attention to the aesthetics of decadent translation, as well as its social networks and material history, generates new insights on the cosmopolitan culture of decadence and Victorian literature more broadly.