Volume 73, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Decadence and the Anglophone Imagination: Aesthetics and Ethics Across History; Editor: James Dowthwaite (Mainz)

This essay begins by discussing Victorian responses to euphuism, the ‘affected’ style of writing associated with the early modern author John Lyly. Focusing on Walter Pater’s association of euphuism with ‘decadent’ style at the fin de siècle , the essay analyses how euphuism was discussed, theorised, and characterised during the early modern period, noting the ways in which later critics might have considered this euphuistic style as ‘decadent.’ More specifically, comparison shows that both early modern euphuism and Pater’s ‘decadent’ style sought to figure themselves as a mode of ‘New English’ which embraced a certain sense of literary and linguistic ‘cosmopolitanism.’

Edward Gibbon’s famous account of the slow ending of the Roman empire, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1787) has long been held to be central to the conception of what decadence is on a civilisational level. ‘Decadence’ as a concept, however, is not something that Gibbon himself ever outlined, and so his links to it were really applied retrospectively. In this article, I outline which aspects of Gibbon’s work were attractive to decadent writers, and what affordances – formal and conceptual – his Decline and Fall provided them. These, I argue, were the following: first, a paradigmatic narrative of civilisational decay: his history of Rome begins at its height and describes a millennium of waning. Second, and related to the first, is that even the zenith of a civilisation contains the seeds of its decay. Thus, the image of the so-called height of a culture is characterised by a pessimistic sense of eventual collapse. His decadence is one in which the perception of civilisation is cultivated by its ending. I look then at how two writers of the fin de siècle , Walter Pater and Michael Field, drew on these aspects of Gibbon’s work.

This article examines the functions of decadence, understood as both a rhetoric of personal, cultural, or civilizational decay and a logic of historical change, as it appears in the early journal writings and first published essay of the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. This article seeks to show, through a close survey of these early writings, that Emerson’s fascination with decadence is not an incidental folly of youth that was quickly outgrown, as is often supposed, but instead provides a crucial infrastructure for the development of the hallmark Emersonian ideas of compensation and self-reliance. By pursuing this line of inquiry, the article makes the case for a more nuanced consideration of Emerson’s status in nineteenth-century American studies and a greater engagement with his work in the field of decadence studies.

This article focuses on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final unfinished novel The Last Tycoon . It illustrates how the novel advances the tropes of the decadent movement as an ironic way to evoke Hollywood and, at its centre, the fictional movie mogul Monroe Stahr. In so doing, I situate the novel and its author in the context of American engagements with decadence in the early twentieth century, and show how Fitzgerald creates a distinctly modern American mode of the phenomenon. On this basis, I argue that The Last Tycoon illustrates Fitzgerald’s continued engagements with the concerns and aesthetics of the decadent movement, despite his own attempts to distance himself from it. Indeed, decadence provides a ready-made aesthetic framework in which to comprehend Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, at the same time as cinematic aesthetics, such as popular music, enable Fitzgerald to expand the imaginative scope of decadence.

Leading magazines of 1960s counterculture in Britain made use of decadent aesthetics, yet the significance of this fin-de-siècle form of an artistic and ideological alternative for the counterculture of the Sixties has often been passed over in accounts of the aftermaths of Decadence. The paper examines the allusion to and the usage and assimilation of principles of decadent visual design as well as the visible incorporation of Beardsley-like style elements in selected pieces of artwork published in the magazines International Times ( IT ) and Oz . Discussing possible functions of these references to Decadence in the context of the 1960s, the article demonstrates the continuing countercultural significance of Decadence as a challenge to mainstream culture.

This article examines the idea of liminality in decadence and American disco; of living through a unique moment on the precipice of potential disaster. It discusses how this idea was envisioned through popular conceptions of 1970s disco in its own time, particularly in how Studio 54, the culture’s most famous if also atypically celebrity-driven club, embodied seventies conceptions of decadence in the USA. This article argues that embracing pleasure in the now, despite crisis, can be a decadent way of finding meaning amongst the uncertainties of society and individual lives. Disco is argued as one manifestation of decadence developed towards the cultural conditions of its own perceived time of upheaval.

This essay examines contemporary depictions of decadent aesthetic excess in Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE (2020) and Thuy On’s Decadence (2021). It posits decolonial motifs of excess as a response to male fin de siècle decadence, motifs which also serve as a new departure for contemporary decadent studies. Shola von Reinhold’s novel undermines both fin de siècle male models of decadence and contemporary forms of white, heteronormative forms of oppression by reclaiming adornment and beauty from a perspective that engages with Blackness, queerness, and transness, embodied particularly in the non-linear figure of the volute. In On’s case, her playful poetics also offer a vision of excess that challenges inherited models. The decadence of Decadence is one in which the woman of color is not an exoticized object of poetic fascination but instead able to define excess and beauty on her own terms. Granting these writers the same space in decadence studies is part of the undisciplining of the field.