Decadence in the Age of Modernism

Kate Hext, Alex Murray, Kristin Mahoney, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Joseph Bristow, Ellis Hanson, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry, Howard J. Booth, Douglas Mao, Kirsten MacLeod, Michèle Mendelssohn, Kate Hext, Alex Murray

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781421429434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s.

Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century.

Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity.

Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Kate Hext and Alex Murray
• 1 Dainty Malice: Ada Leverson and Post-Victorian Decadent Feminism
• 2 The Ugly Things of Salome
• 3 Decadent Paths and Percolations after 1895
• 4 “A Poetess of No Mean Order”: Margaret Sackville, Women’s Poetry, and the Legacy of Aestheticism
• 5 The Queer Drift of Firbank
• 6 Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Decadence
• 7 Woolf and Joyce, Barnes and Beckett: The Legacy of Decadence in Major Modernist Novels
• 8 “The Woodland Whose Depths and Whose Heights Were Pan’s”: Swinburne and Lawrence, Decadence and Modernism
• 9 The Naughtiness of the Avant-Garde: Donald Evans, Claire Marie, and Tender Buttons
• 10 The Queerness of Being 1890 in 1922: Carl Van Vechten and the New Decadence
• 11 A Decadent Dream Deferred: Bruce Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance’s Queer Modernity
• Contributors
• Index