The Decadent Movement
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influence of Baudelaire and Walter Pater on writers and artists in Britain in the 1890s, pursuing art for its own sake and not with moral aims.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.
The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.
With
Neil Sammells
Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
Kate Hext
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
And
Alex Murray
Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson
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LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST
Kostas Boyiopoulous, Yoonjoung Choi, Matthew Brinton Tildesley (eds.), The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 1986)
Nicholas Frankel, The Invention of Oscar Wilde (Reaktion Books, 2021)
Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979)
Kate Hext and Alex Murray (eds.), Decadence in the Age Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)
Philip Hoare, Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century (Arcade Publishing, 2017)
Joris-Karl Huysmans (trans. Robert Baldick, Patrick McGuinness), Against Nature (Penguin, 2003)
Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams (first published 1907; Pinnacle Press, 2017)
Kristin Mahoney, Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Michele Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Alex Murray (ed.), Decadence: A Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (first published 1873; Oxford University Press, 2010)
Murray G.H. Pittock, The Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s (Routledge, 1993)
Angelique Richardson (ed.), Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914 (Penguin, 2005)
Neil Sammells, Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde (Longman, 2000)
Matthew Sturgis, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s (Pallas Athene, 2011)
Arthur Symons (ed. Roger Holdsworth), Selected Symons (Carcanet, 1974)
David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (first published 1891; Oxford University Press, 2008)
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- Thu 18 Nov 2021 09:00Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
- Thu 18 Nov 2021 21:30Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
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