From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

This chapter focuses on decadence not as a supposed literary revolution culminating in modernism but as a continuity in the adoption of poetic subject-matter of a particular kind, namely, the fates of empires and civilisations, especially their fragility, decline, and disintegration. In works of such non-modernist poets as Rudyard Kipling and W. H. Auden the decadent tradition persists under new twentieth-century conditions, not by echoing Baudelairean moods or manners but by rediscovering and reworking the underlying historical myth of the Decadence—the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, considered explicitly or implicitly as the model for the fates of all later empires. In the half-century considered here, 1897–1947, world events pressed collapsing empires to the attention of writers on an unprecedented scale. At such an epoch Kipling, Auden, and others came forward with boldly ‘prophetic’ visions of a world order that they suggest, by reading the symptoms and auguries of the times, is undergoing general collapse.