Decadence, Dazzle, Dissent: Aestheticism and Cultural Politics in the Long Twentieth Century

This course will explore the literary afterlives of the decadent movement of the fin de siècle. It will begin by considering late-nineteenth-century literary decadence, aestheticism, and cosmopolitanism, focusing in particular on the relationship between aesthetics, form, politics, and community in fin-de-siècle anglophone literature. This work will then be used as a foundation to examine the way in which literary decadence was used by later writers in responding to some of the major crises and conflicts of the twentieth century.

Where decadence has tended to be represented as an individualistic aestheticized form of retreat, associated with a feminised, queer, or in other ways marginalised frivolity, this course will consider the ways in which writers from across the twentieth century harnessed and weaponised this very frivolity as a way of both interrogating and resisting racism, militarism, fascism, and misogyny. In particular, the course will address the ways in which decadence as form, touchstone, exemplar, and inspiration, offered writers resisting various modes of racial subordination, colonialism, and fascism a means of both formal literary resistance and identification with a transnational and transhistorical literary community.

Credit Level: 10 

Year Taken: Year 4 Undergraduate

SCQF Credits: 20