This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s two novels: Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Gaston de Latour (1888, 1896), illustrating how they stand at the heart of his work as aesthetic writer and of new currents in nineteenth-century fiction. It shows that, together, these novels aimed to provide a personal overview of European history in epochs of transition: the transition from paganism to Christianity in the case of Marius, and the Reformation for the unfinished Gaston. The chapter positions these novels in the context of their contemporary debates around the future of the novel, including attention to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) and Emile Zola’s naturalism. The discussion then focuses on Marius as a historical novel, which interweaves history with fiction and intellectual commentary, a decadent novel engaged in the core themes of contemporary French decadence, and a cosmopolitan novel engaged in acts of translation from Latin to English.

This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

Chapter 1 explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and the definitions of literary impressionism put forward in his important essay on French writing, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). The chapter begins by discussing the language of sanity and wholeness (or their absence) in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its emphasis on formal fragmentation and strenuously subjective effects. It suggests that this theory furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which, in turn, provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary seemed to disintegrate under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The chapter concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

This chapter considers Michael Field within the context of nineteenth-century decadence. Drawing on Michael Field’s diaries and poetry, it contextualises their continuing interest in key figures of French decadence, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Paul Verlaine, alongside the broader vogue for decadence in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. While Michael Field claimed to deride decadence, an attention to the influence of French decadence in their works illustrates the extent to which they were poetic innovators, responsive to contemporary fashions, and a part of a longer tradition of writers and artists, such as Arthur Symons, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley, who drew on the fruitful possibilities of decadent concepts in their works.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s position as ‘Victorian decadents’ in the early twentieth century. It outlines Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s ambivalent response to fin-de-siècle decadence, as seen in their reactions to the likes of Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book. The chapter then proposes that Michael Field actually became more attached to decadence as the ‘yellow nineties’ waned, focusing on how Bradley and Cooper’s dedication to decadence is expressed most clearly in poems about Whym Chow, their beloved dog whose death in 1906 catalysed their conversion to Catholicism. The chapter finally discusses the decadent tropes found in Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914) and Michael Field’s Catholic poems.

Classical reception scholarship on Michael Field has primarily focused on the duo’s engagement with ancient Greek poetry, yet the author’s oeuvre contains eight closet dramas and innumerable poems focused on Ancient Rome. This chapter takes a closer look at Michael Field’s Roman Trilogy, comprised of The Race of Leaves (1898), The World at Auction (1901), and Julia Domna (1903), the dramas in which Michael Field grapple most closely with the entanglement between imperial and literary decadence. Through the depiction of queer artists using collaborative art as a form of resistance, the Decadent Trilogy sheds light on Michael Field’s understanding of the resemblance between ancient and modern imperial decadence.

Chapter 7 draws on Nietzsche’s autobiographical writings to focus in on his philosophical methods. Here I identify the three features of genealogical analysis. First, Nietzsche attests to being gripped and limited by theological and moral prejudices, which, as he further suggests, functioned to constrict his evaluative horizons (GM P 3). Second, Nietzsche substantiates further that those deeply entrenched patterns of value and habits of thought, which (non-consciously or pre-reflectively) shaped his outlook, also oriented him in a particular way toward his suffering. As a way of combating that precarity, he adopts, for a time at least, thoroughly moralized responses: He warded off precarity through decadence in the forms of either world-denial (pessimism) or ascetic self-renunciation. Finally, he confirms that refracting these automatic responses through his long-drawn-out illnesses opened up, for him, a new line of sight.

This chapter considers the Russian Symbolist movement as an alternative to the utilitarian-populist literary edifice in addressing the socio-political problems that confronted Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. The chapter traces the growth of the Symbolist movement over its two phases, beginning with the searching attempts of the first generation of Symbolists – especially Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Gippius, and Fedor Sologub – to turn a secular culture in the direction of spirituality and religion; and then the ambitious “theurgical” activist partnership of the second generation of Symbolists – Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, and Viacheslav Ivanov – who rose to prominence during the politically tumultuous age of the fin de siècle (the decade surrounding the revolution of 1905), an era galvanised by a pervasive sense of disorientation, groundlessness, experimentation, and apocalyptic presentiment.

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.