In Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1885–6), a fictional version of Thomas Edison builds a mechanical female automaton as a replacement for a human woman. This chapter reads the novel and its gynoid Hadaly as works of decadent speculative fiction. After tracing the relationships of L’Ève Future to decadence as a literary movement via late nineteenth-century writers such as J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Arthur Symons, it argues that the work’s decadent tropes and commitments allow it to place a critical spin on automata and automatism. Villiers’s vision of automacy – as alluringly artificial yet both relational and entangled in cultural norms about the human – not only exceeds the analogous ventures of the real-life Edison but also resonates with attempts to come to terms with the nature and functions of autonomous artificial entities today.

This chapter is the first of three that centre upon Nietzsche’s critique of pessimism in his mature philosophy of the 1880s. It presents Nietzsche’s psychological critique of pessimism as symptomatic of a particular calibration of one’s ‘drives’ that produces fatigue and a world-directed ressentiment. The chapter gives special attention to the crucial similarities and differences between Nietzsche’s psychological reduction of pessimism and those of the degeneration theorists, and the English psychologist James Sully, arguing that Nietzsche’s own position is subtly unique and, in some ways, more plausible. The final sections of the chapter address (1) Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Christianity as the pinnacle manifestation of pessimistic sentiment and (2) the problem of the ‘scope’ of Nietzsche’s psychological reduction.

This chapter reconsiders the significance of The Beautiful and Damned (1922) to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and his place in American modernist literature. This second novel occupies a minor position in the Fitzgerald canon and is often regarded as a move away from his experimentations with romanticism, aestheticism, and decadence to naturalism. By contrast, this chapter argues that the novel remains committed to fin-de-siècle theories of aesthetic hedonism propounded by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde in formal, thematic, and intellectual terms and brings them into productive tension with naturalism. The Beautiful and Damned is informed by Paterean theories of perception and hedonism in its preoccupation with the brevity of life, the fragility of beauty, and the necessity of cultivating a heightened mode of perception and consciousness. Naturalism, meanwhile, is deployed strategically as in the narrative to expose the naïve and illusory nature of the aesthetic hedonism of its protagonists. This chapter further argues that Fitzgerald’s reliance on fin-de-siècle tropes should not be understood as anomalous or derivative but, rather, that it situates The Beautiful and Damned in a broader “new decadent” literary movement within American modernism.

This chapter explores the ways in which conservative politics and patriotic sentiment circulated in the literary culture of the 1890s, tracing the reactionary and jingoistic positions of a range of writers. From the counter-decadence of Marie Corelli and Hugh E. M. Stutfield, to the conservative critiques of modernity by Arthur Machen and Lionel Johnson, the chapter demonstrates how literary radicalism and political reactionaryism coexisted in the 1890s. It explores debates around patriotism, looking at the passionate support for imperialism in Michael Field, Algernon Charles Swinburne and John Davidson, alongside George Gissing’s conservative critique of the emerging jingoism of the period, and argues that responses to the Second Anglo-Boer War should be placed front and center in literary histories of the 1890s to ensure attention is paid to the conservatism that became ever more pervasive after the Wilde trials. It notes the variety of conservatisms that circulated in the 1890s and the necessity for literary critics to read these responses with care to better understand the complex cultural politics of the decade.

This chapter looks at the discursive production of theater as a decadent institution over the course of the fin de siècle in Britain and France, focusing especially on the prevalence of the antitheatrical prejudice at the time. It considers why theater was thought to be inadequate or injurious on the basis of several kinds of impurity, including the pejorative condemnation of its potentially viral degeneracy (moral impurity), critical ruminations on creative sclerosis and declining artistic standards (aesthetic impurity), as well as the reasons why several prominent playwrights and critics of the period who were closely associated with both decadence and symbolism were uneasy about the staging of decadent drama (metaphysical impurity). Moving from a two-dimensional account of theater’s decadence in the hands of moral purity advocates, to a more nuanced consideration of the surprisingly generative qualities of the “Paterian paradox,” the chapter argues that theater’s decadent “wrongness,” especially when it is embodied and enacted, may be the best starting point we have for appreciating its role in a nascent modernism.

The 1890s have a special significance in the literary history of the Anthropocene, and the fin de siècle has traditionally been understood as a moment when artifice triumphed over nature. Reexamining the period today, we can instead see how literature and art of the 1890s reckons with the idea of an indeterminate nature without design, purpose, or end – a nature profoundly shaped by human forces and yet beyond human reckoning and control. The concentrated finitude of the era, as framed in literary and historical study, actually reflects the period’s own grasp of the finitudes and vicissitudes of the natural world. This chapter aims to tease out the environmental and ecological inheritance of the decadent 1890s while simultaneously teasing apart the complex conceptual contestation among rival assaults on the category of the “natural” in the 1890s, assaults that can be roughly grouped around Oscar Wilde’s 1895 denaturalizing of heterosexuality and Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 denaturalizing of the atmosphere in his landmark essay “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

Before the specter of the Nazi Final Solution, many British intellectuals at the fin de siècle perceived eugenics as forward-thinking and liberating. In their respective novels, A Superfluous Woman (1894) and The Girl from the Farm (1895), the socialist-feminists Emma Frances Brooke and Gertrude Dix paired ideologies of degeneration and eugenics with an endorsement of Edward Carpenter’s ethos of simple living, celebrating good health and wholesomeness. They adopted Francis Galton’s policy of selective breeding yet rejected his promotion of the peerage as “eminent” specimens for propagating future generations. In their fictions, the conservative aristocrat and entitled upper-middle-class man are instead enervated, parasitical decadents and obstacles to social, evolutionary advancement. Ultimately, Brooke’s and Dix’s visions are not altogether unified: whereas Dix simply dismisses her flimsy, immature dandy, Brooke advocates a more radical “negative eugenics” with an eye to her decadent’s diseased offspring. Rejecting privileged, dissipated men in favor of health and liberation, both authors anticipate twenty-first century social critiques of decadence.

Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.

Plutarch’s various comments about wealth are usually recognizable as springing from the same personality, but the emphasis is different in different contexts. This chapter explores this variety within the Lives, and in particular the characteristic connection with moral decadence and decay. Two pairs are explored as test-cases, Agis–Cleomenes–Gracchi and Agesilaus–Pompey. Rome, with signs of luxury and decadence everywhere, might be expected to be particularly in focus, but talk of decadence is most frequent in the Spartan Lives. Is this an indirect way of passing comment on Rome without causing offense That may also explain his frequent reluctance to talk as openly about Roman corruption and bribery as one might expect, especially in connection with a Life’s central figure. He may also be sidestepping too great an emphasis on Roman luxury as this had traditionally been associated with the Greek East.

Russian novels are in intense, ambivalent dialogue with the European tradition; Tolstoy’s take up the British and the French in particular. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reminds us that adultery is an ever-present threat in the British family novel, as it is in the novel of sensation. Like Tolstoy, Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon contrast the dynamics of different marriages. They also set adultery in the context of a system that works against women. In Wood’s East Lynne, Carlyle not only forgives his dying ex-wife, but declines to indict her former lover for murder; as he says, “I leave him to a higher retribution: to One who says ‘Vengeance is mine.’” This quote becomes Tolstoy’s epigraph.

Chapter Five turns to the Harlem Renaissance author and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, arguing that his “Geisha Man,” which centers on the erotic relationship between a white American father and his mixed-race child, should be understood as emerging from his sustained engagement with Decadence and the Salome story. I position this work within the framework of Nugent’s extensive experimentation with Decadence to argue that the text’s Orientalism and its preoccupation with incest should be understood as more than a simple echoing of Decadence’s more troubling tendencies. This content operates within the text in service to Nugent’s efforts to conceptualize mixed-race identity and the rupturing of Black kinship structures within the United States. Salome is for Nugent a story about a fetishized performer attempting to enact erotic agency within a system of fractured familial formations, and revising her story allows Nugent to theorize kinship and multiraciality in relationship to what Hortense Spillers refers to as the “losses” and “confusions” that accompanied the “dispersal of the historic African American domestic unit.” This chapter sheds light on the manner in which Orientalist Decadence was transported across the Atlantic to perform different types of service for Black thinkers in Harlem in the early-twentieth century.

Chapter Four focuses on the Decadent modernist Harold Acton’s time in China and argues that Acton relies on the concept of kinship as he theorizes cosmopolitanism and transnational contact. Inspired in part by Decadent precursors, such as Vernon Lee, he insists that coming into true communion with other nations requires the eschewal of forms of heteronormative domesticity that might delimit mobility or inhibit openness to foreign experience. However, his work is haunted by anxieties about the slippage between cosmopolitanism and Orientalism, and he turns to kinship metaphors, to the figure of transnational adoption, to think through that slippage. He simultaneously suggests that extrication from conventional familial arrangement facilitates transcultural communion and worries, in his figuring of cultural appropriation as unsuccessful transnational adoption, that true transcultural communion is impossible. In examining the manner in which Acton thinks through and against the concept of kinship while theorizing cosmopolitanism, I highlight the influence on his thinking of women writers and artists, such as Vernon Lee, Nancy Cunard, and Anna May Wong, who shared with Acton a vexed relationship to family and marriage as well as the aspiration to move across national and racial boundaries.

Chapter one defines and historically situates the intersections among decadence, ecology, and the pagan revival in literature and art. Noting ecological, scientific, classist, nationalist, and imperialist aspects of decadence in its earliest articulations, focus is given to the shifting formulations of modern decadence in particular by such influential writers as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Max Nordau, the chapter offers close analyses of works by Algernon Swinburne such as his poem ‘The Leper’ (1866) and the Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederick Sandys such as his painting Medea (1868) that demonstrate the complex interplay across these concepts.

The introduction raises the intricate cross-influences among ninetheenth-century science, paganism, and the arts by noting the many renowned experts whose bodies are buried at Holywell Cemetary, Oxford. These include Walter Pater, Kenneth Grahame, botanist George Claridge Druce, zoologist George Rolleson, Celtic scholar John Rhys, Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and comparative philologist Max Müller. This intermingling of earth sciences, paganism, and the arts, I argue, captures the ecological foundations of decadence, despite its more popular conception as defined by artifice, dandyism, and shocking non-conformity. The final section of the itnroduction summarizes the monograph’s chapters.

This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.

Chapter 2 explores a range of fictional and non-fictional writing on dinosaurs. The first half shows how different writers, including Henry Neville Hutchinson, Grant Allen, and geoscientist Henry Woodward, invoked the comic monsters of Lewis Carroll to develop a new, ‘grotesque’ register for describing dinosaurs. This language naturalised an emergent understanding of dinosaurs, especially American dinosaurs like Triceratops, as having gone extinct owing to the evolution of uselessly monstrous characteristics. These ideas were appealingly absurd to general audiences, who could contrast the progressive traits and intelligence of mammals like themselves with the doomed grotesqueness of the dinosaurs. The chapter’s second half examines this new way of talking about dinosaurs, providing close readings of humourist Eugene Field’s poem ‘Extinct Monsters’ (1893), Edward Cuming’s Wonders in Monsterland (1901), and Emily Bray’s Old Time and the Boy (1921). In addition to depicting dinosaurs through Carrollian nonsense conventions, all three of these texts were direct responses to the works of Hutchinson, demonstrating his long-term importance for the popularisation of dinosaurs.

Chapter 3 examines how transatlantic fiction about dinosaurs shaped notions of national potency at a key moment in US and British history. The first half focuses on two American interstellar romances whose violent protagonists vanquish dinosaurs on evolutionarily backward planets. J. J. Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds (1894) has them conquering Jupiter’s dinosaurs before heading to a Christianised Saturn and learning about the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ race’s spiritual evolution, while in Gustavus Pope’s Journey to Venus (1895) they subdue prehistoric Venus in an unruly pastiche of palaeontological writing. The chapter’s second half provides alternative perspectives from British authors whose narratives, all published in 1899, allude to the ongoing search for giant dinosaurs in the American West as a way of reflecting on nation, empire, and masculinity. Henry Hering’s short story ‘Silas P. Cornu’s Divining-Rod’ ridicules the avarice of the US tycoons who fuelled the dinosaur ‘rush’, while C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent and Frank Savile’s Beyond the Great South Wall have encounters with giant brontosaurs reinvigorating men’s imperialistic masculinity in over-civilised societies.