Landscapes of Decadence

Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle

Alex Murray

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781107169661
• eBook ISBN: 9781316766910
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Landscapes of Decadence: Reading the Sermons in Stone
• Chapter 1 The Disappearing Ghosts of Naples
• Chapter 2 ‘Paris and London, World-Flowers twain’
• Chapter 3 Stirring the Cumnor Cowslips in Decadent Oxford
• Chapter 4 The Glowing Furnace of Decadent Wales
• Chapter 5 ‘Venice, sans hope’: Reading Decadent New York
• Conclusion: ‘Running into Fairy-land’
• Notes
• Index