This chapter examines the often vexed relationship between literary Decadence and the media in Britain. While writers such as Wilde may have espoused elitist doctrines, they relied on print media to publish, popularize and denigrate their work. Decadence was then caught up in a complex web of financial, cultural and political forces that demanded it engage with the mass media it ostensibly despised. The chapter begins with a study of avant-garde publishing, beginning with the Century Guild Hobby Horse before moving on to those flagship Decadent periodicals The Yellow Book and The Savoy, examining how these outlets negotiated, with varying success, a competitive marketplace. In opposition to these self-consciously elite productions, the chapter places the relentless mockery of Decadence in publications like Punch, where figures such as Wilde and Beardsley were regularly parodied. Yet Decadent writers often published in conservative newspapers and journals, with figures such as Ada Leverson lampooning her friends. The vituperative attack and the sharply observed satire were an essential part of a literary marketplace in which Decadence, all too briefly, thrived.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

As a self-reflexive conceptual category that works by inverting and unsettling commonly held assumptions, decadence has much in common with the device of parody. In England in the early 1890s the self-conscious self-mockery of decadents, dandies, and New Women writers gestured to a robustness and broadening of the decadent tradition. Those New Women writers who used the unorthodoxies of decadence to align themselves against a conservative press did so chiefly via the early volumes of the decadent periodical The Yellow Book between 1894 and 1895. Paradoxically, through the exaggerated appropriation of features of male decadent writing ? egoism, sexual expressiveness, homosexuality ? New Women writers declared their independence from patriarchal literary convention. This chapter discusses the contributions to the Yellow Book of Ella D’Arcy, Ada Leverson, and Victoria Cross, who wrote with a heightened sexual consciousness and a profound sense of disenchantment with contemporary culture in order to raise feminist concerns about sexuality, class, and race.