No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Introduction: The Scales of Decadence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2021
Extract
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.
- Type
- Introduction
- Information
- Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue: Scales of Decadence , Winter 2021 , pp. 541 - 562
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Works Cited
Agathocleous, Tanya. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Carroll, Alicia. New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Constable, Liz, Denisoff, Dennis, and Potolsky, Matthew, eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Dellamora, Richard. “Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde.” New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004): 529–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Desmarais, Jane. “Preface.” Volupté 2, no. 2 (2019), https://volupte.gold.ac.uk/current-issue.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 4 (1979): 534–53.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Evangelista, Stefano. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evangelista, Stefano. “Decadence and Aestheticism.” In The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Denisoff, Dennis and Schaffer, Talia, 106–15. New York: Routledge, 2020–.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anti-colonial Thought, Fin-de-siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Frederick Warne, n.d.Google Scholar
Gilman, Richard. Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979.Google Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren. The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hext, Kate, and Murray, Alex, eds. Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Ledger, Sally. The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997.Google Scholar
MacLeod, Kirsten. Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, Kristin. Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, Catherine. Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Maxwell, Catherine, and Pulham, Patricia, eds. Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Benjamin. “Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets.” Victorian Studies 58, no. 4 (2016): 609–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Østermark-Johansen, Lene. Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture. New York: Routledge, 2011.Google Scholar
Potolsky, Matthew. The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Michael. The Fin-de-Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. “Introduction.” In Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle, edited by Showalter, Elaine, vii–xx. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Spackman, Barbara. “Interversions.” In Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, edited by Constable, Liz, Denisoff, Dennis, and Potolsky, Matthew, 35–49. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998–.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stilling, Robert. Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. 1899. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919.Google Scholar
Wänggren, Lena. Gender, Technology and the New Woman. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. 1895. London: Leonard Smithers, 1899.Google Scholar
Youngkin, Molly. “New Woman Writing.” In The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Denisoff, Dennis and Schaffer, Talia, 296–306. New York: Routledge, 2020–.Google Scholar