“Aestheticism and Decadence”
Without overlooking the French sources of a literary movement characterized by Alfred Tennyson as “Art with poisonous honey stol’n from France,” this course focuses on the theories and practices of aestheticism and decadence in late nineteenth-century Britain.
The Aesthetic movement posed a strenuous challenge to high-Victorian moral certainties with turn away from the social toward a self-enclosed realm of the imagination. In calling for the autonomy of art, Decadence delighted in the perverse, the arcane, and the artificial; instead of looking purposefully forward, it was often self-consciously and theatrically nostalgic for the past.
With a view to developing a sense of the period’s cultural and intellectual context(s), the course will explore the styles and thematic preoccupations of writers whose work has been labelled “Aesthetic” or “Decadent” by themselves and others. In so doing, it will also investigate the relationships between decadent writing and other literary modes, including parody and satire, the gothic, and the emergence of modernism. Writers to be studied include: Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee [Violet Paget, Ada Leverson, Arthur Symons, Michael Field [Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper and Robert Louis Stevenson.
*WARNING: THIS COURSE CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT SOME STUDENTS MAY FIND OFFENSIVE*