The family saga novel – predicated on the assumption of knowable genealogies and on the conceit that the stories of single families can convey the stories of nations – is a fertile and yet fraught territory for Caribbean writers. Maryse Condé has explored this territory more extensively than any other; her novels both reiterate the appeal of genealogical claims and register a clear-eyed suspicion of the notion of lineage and the mythologizing that attends it. Focusing mostly on Tree of Life and The Last of the African Kings, this chapter examines Condé’s mapping of women’s role in biological and narrative reproduction – the essential processes of family formation across time and space, and therefore the engines that power diasporic family sagas. Condé elucidates how this dual reproductive role continually brings women up against the demands and strictures of patriarchy, impacts their erotic and intellectual autonomy, and structurally determines their relationships to other women.

This chapter examines decadence in terms of the contemporary popular obsession with the practice of self-fashioning through dandyism, drag, or costume as a way of negotiating or overcoming social boundaries, often in a playfully transgressive manner. Glam rock stars of the 1970s represent a modern form of dandyism and camp self-expression, while the aesthetics of opulence and excess take on a more profound significance when considered in terms of social inequality in the drag ball culture of 1980s New York where the aspiration to be ‘real’ is enacted through costumes and cosmetics. Decadence in today’s celebrity culture is exemplified by Lady Gaga’s gender-bending pop performance art, and we can also observe a queer countercultural resistance to the mainstream using the same decadent paradoxes of beauty and decay, artifice and reality. The ‘cult of the self’ may seem superficial, but the process of self-fashioning through clothing and makeup is in fact a process of self-acceptance.

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.