Abstract
This chapter surveys the Gothic writers associated with the aestheticism and decadence movement in Britain and France. Contextualising the movement’s roots in the Romantic tradition, the chapter focuses on the work of Charles Baudelaire, Charles Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen. It shows the ways in which these authors gained mutual inspiration from one another, using the Gothic to shed light on both the modernity of the nineteenth century and to problematise its pretentions towards having all the answers. In the course of the chapter, we meet aesthetic and decadent fauns, lamia, werewolves and vampires, consider the ways in which the tradition treats sexual desire and violence, and its interest in a world ‘beyond’, both in its discussions of witchcraft, the occult and Satanism, and in its use of the trope of the ‘gods in exile’. The chapter concludes by arguing for the significance of the aesthetic and decadent tradition on the development of twentieth-century Gothic.
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Whiteley, G. (2021). Aestheticism and Decadence in Britain and France. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40866-4_41
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