Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe. Decadent Poetics has gathered together some of the most important scholars working in Victorian studies, with the ten essays here exploring the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics. Invigorated by shifts in Victorian studies over the past ten years, this collection interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. The term 'poetics' conveys here not just the prosodic, but the multiplicitous forms of cultural production across the fin de sïcle. From perfume to the post-human, theatre to attenuated textualities, these essays explore the ways in which the literary intersects with its others in the period. The range of writers studied here moves from those who now constitute a decadent canon - Oscar Wilde, 'Michael Field', Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Ernest Dowson - to those whose work still inhabits the scholarly margins: A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen, Hubert Crackanthorpe and Graham R. Tomson Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: Decadent Poetics....Pages 1-25 How Decadent Poems Die....Pages 26-45 Did a Decadent Metre Exist at the Fin de Siècle?....Pages 46-64 Decadent Forms: Parnassus in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction....Pages 65-82 The Harem of Words’: Attenuation and Excess in Decadent Poetry....Pages 83-99 In Praise of Decadence: The Epideictic Mode from Baudelaire to Wilde....Pages 100-115 Another Renaissance: The Decadent Poetic Drama of A. C. Swinburne and Michael Field....Pages 116-140 Salome, Simile, Symboliste....Pages 141-162 Naturalism and Decadence: The Case of Hubert Crackanthorpe....Pages 163-180 ‘A Disembodied Voice’: The Posthuman Formlessness of Decadence....Pages 181-200 Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence....Pages 201-225 Back Matter....Pages 226-235