The introduction defines and historicizes aestheticism and evolutionism, stressing their concurrent emergence in Britain in the 1850s. The introduction then lays out the book’s central claims, provides an accessible review of relevant scholarship on both aestheticism and the history of Victorian science, and situates the project within this broader field. In the course of this overview, the introduction also addresses the problematic Eurocentrism endemic in evolutionary aesthetic conceptions of cultural progress and lays out why the book does not engage directly with questions of race. Finally, the introduction explains the methodology of the project and summarizes its trajectory.

The third chapter traces the linkages between evolutionary science and aestheticism through the work of popular science writer Grant Allen and the arch aesthete Oscar Wilde, who shared a penchant for socialist politics as well as a firm belief in the truth of both Charles Darwin’s and Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theories. More importantly, Allen and Wilde were similarly repulsed by the cultural implications of social Darwinism, and for that reason looked to sexual selection – and, by extension, aesthetics – for a life-affirming alternative to the pressures of Darwinian competition. In their fiction and critical prose from the 1880s and 1890s, this chapter argues, both Allen and Wilde eventually arrived at a markedly utopian aesthetics that posited individual self-culture, through the emancipated pursuit of pleasure, as the key to radical social change. This chapter thus sheds light on aestheticism’s late-century polemical turn, which made it a lightning rod in the sexual controversies of the fin de siècle.

A period of significant demographic, social, and political transformation produced essays marked by a deep seriousness of tone and a sense of weighty purpose that departed sharply from the playful quality of the periodical tradition and the lighter touch of the Romantic familiar essay. Essayists in criticism of this period (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, William Morris, Oscar Wilde) were deeply engaged in defining ideas of culture that could encompass an increasingly diverse and fragmented society. This chapter reflects on the publication contexts that shaped some of the best-known examples of the Victorian critical essay; examines Victorian critics’ emphasis on specific capacities in perception as a ground for pedagogical exposition with the aim of achieving social coherency; and highlights the deep historicism and awareness of mediation that informs the Victorian essayist’s approach to cultural criticism.

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

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.”

Until the late twentieth century, literary scholars often assumed that Victorian scientific advances challenged the dominance of religion, theorizing that religious institutions and beliefs decline with modernity. More recently, scholars affiliated with the “religious turn” in Victorian studies have suggested Christian denominations gradually embraced scientific ideas, with new religious movements such as Spiritualism and Theosophy enabling Victorians to preserve elements of Christianity (e.g., belief in an afterlife) in a rapidly changing world. This chapter intervenes in these debates using two very different novels as case studies: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan (1895), both of which freely mix Christianity with science: Wilde blends Catholicism, neuroscience, and aestheticism, while Corelli creatively revises scientific theories to align with her heterodox faith. With their occult and pseudoscientific leanings these works ask us to reconsider what counted as religion or science and to redraw the boundaries of faith to encompass unorthodox trends.

There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

The introduction considers the appeal Decadence and the work of Oscar Wilde held for queer, cosmopolitan subjects in the early-twentieth century who wished to reimagine structures of kinship. Decadence’s association with sexual dissidence and curiosity along with Wilde’s reputation as a sexual martyr informed the thinking of authors and artists in the twentieth century who worked to generate alternatives to heteronormative practices of affiliation. These figures operated alongside but saw themselves as distinct from high modernist networks, turning to the fin de siècle past to express their sense of distinction from the aesthetic modes in fashion at the time. While Wilde’s capacity for reimagining new modes of kinship informed more liberatory strains of twentieth-century Decadence, his interest in age-differentiated eroticism and the more general tendency to Orientalism within the Decadent Movement also inflected the practices marked by his influence during this period. The introduction thus stresses that the kinship experiments of twentieth-century Decadents carried forward the many political valences of their source material and that their work should be approached through the framework of what Kadji Amin has called “deidealization,” a mode of queer historical practice that acknowledges that queer alternatives are not always just alternatives.

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Chapter One argues that Vyvyan Holland forged a textual relationship with his father Oscar Wilde while collaborating with early Wilde scholars in the editing of Wilde’s letters and extended his father’s practice of importing sexually dissident content from abroad while translating works by the French modernist Julien (or Julian) Green. Following Wilde’s trials, his sons were separated from their mother and from one another and shuttled between various boarding schools abroad, an experience Holland described as deeply traumatic and lonely. His existence was devastated by the effects of late-Victorian sexual legislation, which divided him from his family. But, when he came of age, he found community with a network of men who loved Wilde and loved books, locating himself amidst other forms of relationality and affection. This chapter asserts that Holland modeled his own cosmopolitan aesthetic on his father’s, remaining similarly detached from and skeptical of English moral sensibilities, and focuses on how the translation of queer modernist texts allowed him to obliquely continue his father’s queer cosmopolitan project. Holland was able to find his way back to his father through textual acts, acts of cosmopolitan collaboration and translation, and by generating an alternative familial bond with early Wilde scholars.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the place of desire and disembodiment in queer musical experience. Taking as its focus the writings of John Addington Symonds, this chapter examines the representation of the voice of the chorister in late Victorian literature. The fetishization of the chorister in pederastic texts by Symonds and John Gambril Nicholson forms part of a broader eroticization of childhood innocence in Victorian culture. An examination of Victorian vocal treatises shows how such vocal innocence is figured as arising from the renunciation of the body. In this respect, Symonds’s desire for the singing voice can be understood in the light of psychoanalytic models in which the voice is understood as a Lacanian ‘lost object’. The pederastic listening practices engaged in by Symonds and his contemporaries invite a reassessment of the frequent idealization in queer studies of the singing voice as a space in which sexual desire may be freely and unproblematically explored. The discussion draws upon recent work in queer studies calling for closer engagement with those shameful and embarrassing aspects of queer history that many in the queer community today might prefer to forget.

Stoppard’s brilliant verbal wit locates him in the theatrical tradition of Oscar Wilde; The Importance of Being Earnest is the central intertext of Stoppard’s Travesties and Wilde himself plays a significant role in The Invention of Love.

This paper examines three different receptions of Plato’s Charmides – Oscar Wilde’s Charmides, Cavafy’s In a Town of Osroene, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. It focuses on their responses to the erotic and philosophical element in the Charmides. Wilde provides an example of minimal textual engagement: the name Charmides is invoked solely for its connotations of young, male beauty. In Cavafy explicit allusion to ‘the Platonic Charmides’ recasts the poem an expression of homoerotic desire, and endows its group of young men with the prestige of a Platonic gathering and Platonic love. In contrast, Plutarch’s engagement with the Charmides is implicit, and depends entirely on the reader’s ability to recognise a series of detailed verbal echoes. Plutarch denies that Socrates’ motivation was sexual, and integrates allusion to the Charmides into a broader network of allusions to other passages in which Plato describes Socrates’ encounters with beautiful young men, or the ideal relationship of a mature man with a younger beloved, in which the sexual element is entirely absent. In so doing, Plutarch “corrects” Plato with Plato, and removes what had become an embarrassment in his period.

In this first of paired chapters bearing down on the evolutionary history and philosophy of literary language, Victorian narratives differently concerned with the term “medium” – George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – undergo an intensive reading that opens directly onto Giorgio Agamben’s investigations into the always mysterious ontological conjuncture of idea and its sayability, object and its name, in human discourse – and since then onto conceptual poet John Cayley’s theory of “grammalepsy.” Literary examples of prose under duress, from Herman Melville to D. H. Lawrence, return reading to a more close-grained application of Agamben’s poetics (rather than ontology), where the “give” – and take back – of a medium’s oscillatory potential can only be played out before us, tacitly at least, in a foundational contrast to the logic (following Agamben) of the non-extensive point in calculus, the signifying unit that has, unlike syllabic language, no subsidiary elements.

This chapter explores the nature of European celebrity ca. 1900 as a context for Mahler’s mission to promote himself and his works among the public at large. Figures such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlotte Wolter, and Hans Makart found ways in their respective fields to walk the line between popular success and artistic achievement, maintaining highbrow prestige while intriguing the public to a significant degree, particularly among the educated middle class. The growth of a consumer class, and the proliferation of opportunities for that class to consume those celebrities and personalize them in the process, provided a rationale for the lower middle class to push up against the cultural capital of the educated bourgeoisie. In this environment, Mahler’s creative project, as creator and as performing artist, emerged as a recognizable, if idiosyncratic, attempt at artistic fame in the modern sense.

This chapter considers the importance of life writing to the development of Decadent literary production and to the afterlives of the Decadent movement. Beginning with Walter Pater, we explore the creative approach Decadent writers took to biography and the imagined fictional life. If Wilde, Pater, and John Addington Symonds established the pattern of Decadent life writing, Charles Ricketts and Laurence Housman deployed its practices and politics as they recalled Wilde’s tragic downfall and early death. In the early years of the twentieth century the history of British literary Decadence was still very much contested, and alongside life writing emerged the memoir and the period study that framed the 1890s in relation to the literary innovations of modernism. The creative approach to Decadent life writing waned in the second half of the twentieth century as professional literary critics sought to develop authoritative versions of Decadent biography, a practice seemingly at odds with earlier Decadent practices.

This chapter explores discriminatory language with regard to sexual orientation and sexuality. Starting with the story of playwright Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment, we look at the history of criminalizing same-sex attraction. Ways of talking about same-sex sexuality over time are discussed, both in-group and out-group, and the use of coded language, such as Polari. Slurs are treated, as well as the reclamation of some of these terms, especially queer and gay. We look at historical and contemporary cases of homophobia in language from popular culture and the media.

Recognizing the complexity, strangeness and variety of the Decadent interest in religion, this chapter asks what about religion proved so attractive. Noting some of the scholarly developments in this area since the turn of the twenty-first century, the chapter considers the limits of a secular purview and invites readers to join with the Decadents in seeking a more capacious understanding of what religious belief might entail. The work of reimagining belief has long been part of the life of faith, and the chapter explores this point by developing a theological account of desire in the work of Oscar Wilde and Michael Field. Just because the Christian faith is fluid and complex in the work of the Decadents, it does not follow that Decadence is inevitably heterodox. However, the Decadents’ interest in religion did sometimes take them beyond the Christian faith to other faith traditions and to mysticism and the occult.

Decadents believed their civilization had reached its peak and was on the brink of collapse. The only solution was the destruction of civilization by ‘barbarians’ who would bring ‘fresh blood’ to humanity. Eventually their civilization would also grow old and weaken, and a new cycle would begin. The archetypal model for this trope was the collapse of the Roman Empire. Paul Verlaine’s famous poem ‘Languor’ exemplifies this Decadent motif, on which Joris-Karl Huysmans also elaborates. The first part of this chapter illustrates how Verlaine’s poem directly influenced Valery Bryusov’s ‘The Coming Huns’, a touchstone of Russian Decadence. One of the many variants of the ‘Roman Paradigm’ was the destruction of Sodom, a motif examined in the second half of the chapter, focusing on the poetry of Jiří Karásek. Karásek wrote the first homoerotic verse in Czech literature under the influence of Oscar Wilde, whom he bravely defended as de facto editor of the Decadent journal The Modern Revue. Thus this chapter focuses on two variants of the trope of civilization’s collapse, one influenced by French Decadence and the other by British Decadence.