Description
The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.
Table of Contents
1. Landscapes of Decadence: reading sermons in stone; 2. The disappearing ghosts of Naples; 3. Paris and London, world-flowers twain; 4. Stirring the Cumnor cowslips in Decadent Oxford; 5. The glowing furnace of Decadent Wales; 6. Venice, sans hope: reading Decadent New York.
