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This paper examines differing articulations of proto-lesbian identity in the long nineteenth century, in which educated, middle-class white women emulated the figure of Sappho in their writing and ...

Though the field of decadence is currently being reformulated as a global phenomenon (the result of a major move in literary studies towards World Literature), the rich culture of modern languages present in the work of women writers remains mostly unexplored. This essay uses as case studies poems by Christina Rossetti and Sarojini Naidu. Through a translingual framework, it reflects on the continual mediation of languages present in their work, the result of their cosmopolitan, multilingual lives. Emphasizing the creative energy modern languages brought to their decadent works, the essay highlights their linguistic experimentalism and how they destabilized the masculine and imperialist politics of the English language. The overall aim of this essay is to underscore that there is a larger linguistic and cultural history of women’s decadence that needs to be written by many critics working in many languages and cultural histories.

While Nancy Cunard is often understood in relation to the modernist and surrealist circles in which she moved in the early-twentieth century, as Jane Marcus’s recent work on Cunard indicates, her c...

To conceive of modernist feminist decadence without rehashing, let alone reinscribing, the primacy of the historical movement demands particularly malleable approaches to feminism, including fresh ...

The styles, moods, performances, and practices of decadence have been simultaneous with modernization, not least in the process of nation-building. This article considers the dialectics of decadence and modernization with particular attention to the roles and responses of women in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. World-historically, this was the emergence of self-governing dominions of Anglophone cultures, increasing US influence, and decolonization. Eighty-five states gained independence since 1922, with the African nation-states after 1956. While nationalist projects often deferred the Woman Question, liberal projects of New Womanism initiated debate between feminist individualism and more collectivist practices and ideologies. Movements like social Darwinism and eugenics impacted on women, and in terms of deformed relations of part to whole (a classic definition of decadence), modernization included the great unification movements of the “Pans” – Pan-Hellenism, -Islamism, -Asianism, -Africanism, and Zionism – but also the partitions of India/Pakistan, Palestine/Israel, the PRC/Taiwan, Ireland, Korea, Vietnam, and Cyprus, which often impacted women unequally. Under processes of globalization and nation-building, modernization and expressions of decadence have been in dialectical relations, though the meanings and targets shift as hegemons rise and fall.

In the Western decadent imagination, Egypt has been figured as the site of Orientalist fantasy, a land of sphinxes, pyramids, and mummies having little to do with modernity. For a modern Arab write...

This article uncovers the first publication of Gertrude Bell, known in the early twentieth century for her exploration, archaeological work, and diplomacy in the Middle East. Examining her 1894 tra...

Islam shows that because the materialistic and hedonistic life currently characterising modernity only emphasises the physical aspects of life, spiritual aridity, moral decadence and stress will be...

The story of early twentieth-century Anglophone literature has often been told as the story of how modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot made a clean break with the decadent movement of the...

Many have struggled to argued whether Rachilde reverses gender binaries or reinforces them by ensuring the continuation of active and passive partners within the narrative of Monsieur Venus. Howeve...

Le Rivage des Syrtes, a 1952 novel by Julien Gracq, narrates the trajectory of Orsenna, a fictional Western empire, toward its obliteration. This article analyzes the decadence that gives birth to ...

This article explores the work of Lutheran missionary F. W. Albrecht, who in the decades following the Second World War instituted a privately funded school scheme to provide formal education to Ab...

Amidst a resurgence of critical interest in Richard Wagner’s music, Alain Badiou has claimed that historical debating about Wagner forms a distinctive ‘genre’ of philosophical polemic; a distinctiv...

Walter Pater’s unfinished historical novel Gaston de Latour (1888–94), set during the French Wars of Religion in the late sixteenth century, operates on a complex monochromatic colour symbolism tha...

Bryce Echenique’s novel has been read as an illustration of the decadence of Peru’s mid twentieth-century oligarchy, which presages their fall and, alternatively, as a celebration of oral language. By concentrating on gender analysis, the present study draws on the novel’s orality to argue that, in spite of its seemingly arbitrary structure, Un mundo para Julius narrates, in a consistent, linear fashion, the protagonist’s crisis of masculine identification in the years leading up to his arrival at puberty. This crisis is triggered by the protagonist’s loss of his father in infancy, which leaves him without a clear masculine model. Julius’ quest to define a sensitive, aware masculinity capable of diverging from the machista extremes represented by his older brothers and stepfather illustrates the ways in which Bryce Echenique portrays masculinity as a construct, where changes in the details of how men present themselves may yield different gender identifications, and where femininity is defined by its relationship to oligarchical masculinity.

The Arcades Project evokes a dreamy vision of the seduction of Paris in the 1930s as the city is transformed into a world of decadence, depravity and escape. Benjamin’s writing takes us to the Onei...

In the last two-and-a-half decades, the political landscape in Malawi has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis which has been characterized by institutional and legislative instruments that tilt to...

Like the Tardis, this slim and neat publication is beautifully misleading. Out of it spills Skelly’s methodical and lucidly written text that really packs a punch for contemporary feminist textiles...

This essay explores D’Annunzio’s reception of Nietzsche—particularly his sociopolitical theory and idea of the Ubermensch—as dramatized in his novel Le Vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks...

Villaespesa was a major player in the first guerra literaria (c.1898–1902). From 1902 he found a new style but never associated with the writers centred on the magazine Helios in a second guerra literaria. Further collections he published also failed to capture the new Symbolist style of Jimenez and Machado. From 1912, engaged in his Moorish dramas and absent on lengthy visits to Latin America, he disappeared from the Madrid literary scene. Villaespesa has failed to engage the critical attention given by scholars to his contemporaries. This essay seeks to explain why such a prolific and, initially, successful poet, despite attempted re-assessments by critics, remains at the margins of modernista history.

From the shootings on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, to the Nice attacks on Bastille Day, France has experienced two “anni horribiles” (2015 and 2016). My article notes an enthusias...

The aim of this article is to shed light on the ways in which ideas of and discourses about Europe were influenced by some readings of war and war violence from the 1870s to the 1890s. This aim is pursued by considering the dichotomy progress/decadence, a crucial opposition for grasping images and notions of Europe as well as interpretations of warfare violence. The article focuses on the works of Max Nordau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the young Paul Valéry at a time when, in intellectual and academic circles, there was an increasing fear of European decadence and degeneration.

When Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik died unexpectedly in 2018, he left behind a vast and richly imagined body of literature. The following article examines one thread of Towfik’s literary universe: the interconnectivity of moral decadence, information and communication technology, and revolution. Examining in detail Towfik’s major works from the post-2011 period, this article also brings into focus the greater arc of Arabic science fiction and the relationship of the nascent genre to the region’s largely static history of utopic political movements.

As the ‘Acknowledgements’ (x) and ‘Translators’ Note’ (xi) demonstrate, this is a revised edition of Albert’s Saphisme et decadence dans Paris fin-de-siecle (Paris: Martiniere, 2005) in which autho...

The fin-de-siecle period has been described as “one of the least well understood in Scottish cultural history” (p. 5). Although individual figures like Robert Louis Stevenson have been integrated i...

In a compact book that ranges over two centuries of aristocratic experience and intellectual innovation, Chad Denton argues that, in the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, me...

The Marques de Campo barely figures in the literary histories of fin de siglo poetic practice. His works have, almost entirely, fallen into obscurity. The re-publication in 2006 of his second poeti...

At the turn of the twentieth century the philosophical theory of Positivism informed most intellectual, political, and cultural endeavors, permeating private and public discourse. People lived in t...

This paper re-evaluates the significance of Jesus for Nietzsche by looking at The Anti-Christ. Specifically we will ask whether a re-evaluation of this relation can shed new light on Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. And we will do this first by surveying the standard interpretations of this issue, as well as the existing literature on The Anti-Christ. Arguing that the latter picks out nothing new regarding a critique of Christianity, we nonetheless suggest that a new criticism can be developed via the discussion of Jesus there. Further, this can be done by looking at the account given of faith and belief in that text. That is, we will explore the status of Jesus for Nietzsche by looking at the origins and development of “faith” as a mode of belief. In particular, we trace the former’s development as a type from a basic mode of faith. As such, we begin by looking at the psychological origins of this kind of belief in “decadence”, and why Nietzsche is critical of this. However, we will then discuss the...

This article considers how an aesthetics of decadence underpins approaches to design and audience engagement in work by Punchdrunk, SHUNT and Hammer Film Productions. Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death (2007–08) invited wandering audiences to inhabit the ruinous landscapes of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories, recognised posthumously as ‘decadent’ fiction. SHUNT's The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face (2014) guided promenading audiences through a series of discarded shipping containers, each containing a lonesome occupant appearing in a state of disturbing physical decay – a dystopian reflection, perhaps, on the decadence of capitalism. And Hammer Film Productions’ Hammer House of Horror Live – The Soulless Ones (2017) staged a macabre homage to Hammer Horror films, complete with necromancy, blood-sucking vampires and orgiastic rituals. In this article, I explore how each performance, in its own way, gestures towards a decadent imagination identified and unpacked in light of criticism that informed its evolution in the nineteenth century, alongside more recent analysis that has reset the parameters of its study. This article also presents a challenge to scholarship that narrows focus to the enervating qualities of immersive theatre by considering ruination and decay as important themes informing the design of each performance, and the engagement of audiences both with and within ruined environments both actual and artificial. I argue that the decadent imagination is of much relevance to the study of aesthetics and politics in work that either sensationalises or questions its atomising tendencies, and that such work has much to offer to how decadence is understood, not just as a mutable concept, but as a radical practice.

After the Commune and the terrible defeat in the war of 1870, J.-K. Huysmans, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and others created a kind of art based on hedonism, beauty, a refined style, and analogical (...

La decadence se complait dans la reecriture des grands themes bibliques, litteraires et mythiques. La fascination de J.-K. Huysmans pour les saints transparents par exemple, dont on retrouve plusie...

Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-Siecle France is Nicole G. Albert’s concentrated study of a complex subject and phenomenon—that of the lesbian and sapphism as soc...

This article explores the interconnections between the media in France and the emergence of a Franco-British alliance on the eve of World War Two, emphasising how newspaper, radio and newsreel coverage helped mould British perceptions of France during the late-1930s. It will argue that British assessments of France, and thus France's potential value as a wartime ally, were influenced greatly by the dominant representations furnished by the media. In 1936, such representations portrayed a polarised France unworthy of British support; by 1939, they depicted a strong and united country of inestimable value to Britain. This transformation was not simply fortuitous; by the late-1930s, French politicians, conscious of the deleterious effect that media representations of a divided France was having on their country’s prestige, endeavoured to transform the media from a symptom of decadence and malaise into a weapon of unity and strength.

In 1964, two years after Trinidad and Tobago gained its independence from Great Britain, Derek Walcott reflected on the expressive predicament of West Indian artists who continued to rely upon conv...

At the end of the nineteenth century in America, there emerged groups of writers, artists and intellectuals identifying themselves with Decadence. In light of the chaos and human misery brought by the rapid transformations of the world around them, which presaged the end of an empire, if not of the world, they made a deliberate decision to turn away from genteel, bourgeois ideals of happiness and pleasure. The response to a crumbling civilization was a search for pleasure and beauty in the strange, the perverse, the sick and the diseased. One of the most striking features of Decadence, especially for its detractors, was its deliberately affected pessimism. This willful sadness and the criticism it created, suggest a facet of the way that affect, gender, health, nation and empire were connected at this historical moment. Willful sadness marked Decadents as gender transgressing, unhealthy and a threat to both the gender order and America’s national self-image.

This article investigates how Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death brings together Nietzsche’s ideas and Wagner’s music and interweaves them with the motifs of literary Decadence and the auth...

Based on a carefully selected list of references in Spanish, the following text presents a brief history of the magic lantern in Spain, from its invention to the beginning of its decadence as a social medium of communication. The magic lantern emerged in the seventeenth century, with the application of a series of physical principles that allowed the first attempts and experiences of image projection, such as the one described by Juana Ines de la Cruz in Sueno, a silva strophe published in Seville in 1692. As a device, the magic lantern finally was consolidated during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, mainly due to the popular sessions of phantasmagorias, which, in Spain, were run by projectionists such as Juan Gonzalez Mantilla, or Robertson himself. After the magic lantern became institutionalized and commercialized throughout the whole Iberian Peninsula—the same as in the rest of Europe—its decline took place in the last decade of the nineteenth century, when it had to compete with the cinema...

In the second half of the twelfth century, the Maghreb and the Mashriq saw two new political and religious projects taking place, which shared a common reformist spirit. The Almohad movement and the process initiated by Zankī (r. 1127–1146) gave a crucial role to jihād, as well as introducing far-reaching religious reform, doing away with the supposed decadence that had taken hold in the years before. The combination of these two elements gave rise to a greater exchange between religiosity and war. A comparative analysis of Islamic sources from both east and west reveals this increase of religiosity in war in three different fields: the participation of religious elites in the armies; the rise in the use of rituals and religiosity while at war, by means of sermons, speeches and the use of “sacred” objects; and miraculous events related to acts of war.

Large-scale investments in health technologies often have limited evidence for effectiveness when first introduced. Nevertheless, professional and public discourses often present the advantages of such investments, with unknown risks, as necessary and entailing significant improvement. Such discourses are evident with the introduction of the Linac Adapted Conebeam Imager (LACI), introduced to improve the accuracy of radiotherapy treatments. From one perspective, the introduction of such technologies can be considered to be decadent since there is limited, if any, evidence of improvement of current standards and procedures, yet they are promoted as the latest and best technologies for solving societal problems. Connecting the concepts of decadence to those of path dependence, through the case of the LACI, enables the exploration of the ‘technical interrelatedness’ of technological changes. Building on the concept of path dependence, it is possible to demonstrate how introducing a closely related technology does not only become a low-risk course of action. Rather change is demanded (but not determined) as well as potential alternative systems being obscured. With decadent technologies, any future changes are not only dependent upon past introductions; but also they create a need for future changes. Such a view demonstrates how these technologies may not necessarily offer any improvements, but rather contribute to the creation of ongoing demand for unproven technologies. As a result they may encourage the introduction of increasingly complex technologies.

This article examines Michael Field's avant-guard poetic dramas post 1895, in particular the Roman Trilogy (The World at Auction, The Race of Leaves, and Julia Domna), to suggest they should be read for their extraordinary poetic experimentation, which precedes, prefigures and is at the heart of modernism's innovations in the genre. It argues that influenced by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly The Birth of Tragedy, Michael Field turned to Latin decadence and to contemporary German philology to re-energise the genre. The essay also suggests that the Trilogy's emphasis on dance foreshadows the impact of Ballet Russes on modern aesthetics.

This article examines the ways in which two prominent Nigerian playwrights, Wole Soyinka and Esiaba Irobi, re-envision common perceptions of the Nigerian armed forces as portrayed in literature. Despite nearly two decades of often-tumultuous democratic rule, Nigeria is yet to attain full membership of the league of democratic nations. In The Beatification of Area Boy and Cemetery Road, Soyinka and Irobi respectively look at the ways in which authoritarian regimes have sought to repress and subjugate hapless indigenous populations. The country increasingly finds itself between two psychological dispositions: the traumatized psyche occasioned by the military in the past, and the democratic dispensation which represents the present. Soyinka’s artistic commitment is ostensibly demonstrated in constant questioning and an accusatory historicization of the role of the military in the tragedy of Nigeria’s decadence in his play, The Beatification of Area Boy, while Irobi dramatizes the weaving together of the hist...

Wang Shizhen was a key figure in mid-Ming intellectual culture and political life. This essay explores the question of Ming decadence using Wang's writings and his role as a focus of literary and political controversy to highlight the impact of commercialization and materialism on Chinese society and culture.

This essay offers an intervention to the field of Chinese art history, arguing that a decadence model has been tacitly operating in studies of late Ming painting, and that this model has clouded our understanding of this art. A possible source of the decadence model is explained, and a few of the terms resulting from its application are contemplated. A number of historical fallacies that have combined with the decadence model are identified, and are brought to bear in a cautionary note to beware of confusing cause for correlation.

The late Ming dynasty continues to fascinate, for its strange combination of prosperity and catastrophe. While it may indeed be a certain morbidity in our historical hindsight that compels us to re...

Marcel Prevost, a prolific novelist, journalist, and academician, is best known for works such as Les Demi-Vierges (1894), which demonstrates how Parisian society and education corrupt young women, and Les Vierges fortes (1900), which, according to Louise Lyle, “develop[s] the concept of the secular, self-perpetuating community of female educators only to explode it as an empty ideal” (60). In his 1893 novel, L’Automne d’une femme, Prevost focuses not on virgins but on the older woman, telling the story of forty-year-old Julie, who has languished for over twenty years in an arranged marriage to Antoine Surgere. Despite having the natural ability to ease the suffering of others, Julie shows no interest in nursing her husband when he falls ill, though she eagerly cares for the daughter of one of his colleagues, Claire Esquier, and the son of another associate, Maurice Artoy, who is all too eager to reciprocate when Julie's feelings for him become something more than maternal. Unbeknownst to Julie, however, ...

The temptation of decadence persists in the critical tendency to diagnose authors and their works, to trace out genealogies of an infamous familial line, from Charles Baudelaire to Joris-Karl Huysmans. This study proposes an alternative approach to defining decadence by its descent, assembling a discursive inheritance of portraits of the artist: descriptions of the artist-as-subject that serve as critical representations of aesthetic ideas. By examining how portraits of the artist function in Baudelaire’s art criticism, in the formulations of his posthumous critics, and in Huysmans’s compendious novel, I will trace out an unacknowledged continuity from the decadence of aesthetics to the aesthetics of decadence. Decadence, as it descends from Baudelaire through portraits of the artist, originates in the problem of subjectivity in aesthetics.

This article examines a group of restorationist proposals for Spanish Hispaniola from the late seventeenth century in the context of peninsular arbitrismo in order to understand the participatory nature of reform throughout Spain's empire. While their aims were more limited than those of arbistristas across the Atlantic, colonial advocates' idealized visions of the island and claims about the major threats it faced represented a shared local imaginary, and their proposals found a receptive audience in metropolitan authorities, who agreed that Hispaniola had strategic value but were constrained by limited resources. Taken together, the recommendations of overseas advocates and the responses of royal councilors illustrate a transatlantic conception of the Spanish monarchy and an active desire for restoration during the reign of Charles II, despite the supposed decadence of Spain under the last Habsburg monarch.

This article examines several forms of intermedial adaptation arising from the creative and reception processes of the opera Thais, premiered at the Paris Opera in March 1894. With a libretto by Louis Gallet and a score by Jules Massenet, the opera was based on the 1890 novel by Anatole France. Written in an age of Symbolist and post-Wagnerian aesthetics, the opera used innovative orchestral interludes to capture the philosophical tenets of the novel, and, in a social and medical climate preoccupied with decadence and degeneration, it depicted Thais as a mystical hysteric. Press reception of the opera in caricatural and parodical forms treated these and other reception issues via temporal and geographical re-contextualizations of the opera’s story, producing complex intertextual discourses and meta-discourses. Within these intermedial processes, each version of the Thais story used and adapted the conventions of the previous genre to fit the new, thereby creating a network of narratives in an exploration and understanding of communication and meaning, convention and genre.

'Cloth for Men', the title of this 10,000-word article, is also the strapline for a body of advertisements for the Tonik brand of mohair manufactured by Dormeuil, which appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine between 1968-73. Many menswear manufacturers and labels were promoted in its pages, and tailors in particular: in November 1967, for instance, tailors spent £256,600 on press advertising, while between 1969 and 1970 sales of suits constituted 11 million units. The most common utopian symbolism in campaigns for tailors like Austin Reed, Burton's and Hector Powe concentrated on the theme of hetero-normative flirtation and the idea that wearing a suit would make men more attractive to women. In contrast, the advertising agency Michael Robinson Associates evolved a more egregious and ludic use of gender stereotypes with ‘Cloth for Men’. In part, this was down to the challenge of manmade suiting fabrics such as Terylene and the impact of youth culture on advertising rhetoric. But there was another double impetus for Dormeuil's symbolic approach: the fact that the ABC1 readership of the Sunday Times Magazine was 'younger, better off and better educated' and the onset of the economic recession in 1973-74, which (as much as the Great Depression of the 1930s) necessitated publicity that was understated, elegant, urbane and witty, and which would stand out in a crowded market. Thus 'Cloth for Men', art directed by Peter Watson and photographed by Alec Murray, Franco Rubartelli, and Victor Skrebneski, was replete with literary and artistic allusions to decadent sexualities, with German model Veruschka von Lehndorff wearing 1930s-styled clothing and the copy and mise-en-scene evoking a nineteenth century sensibility. Veruschka also ‘doubled up’ to play both ‘male’ and ‘female’ parts, and, accordingly, I want to analyse how the gender ambiguities and criss-crossing of time connoted in the rhetoric of the ads perform what Jane Gaines has called a kind of ‘homosexual/heterosexual flip-flop’, and how the knowing transvestism, style and visual decor they represent overlap with Susan Sontag’s notion of Camp as ‘Being-as-Playing-a-Role’.