Decadence, Literary Form, and Uneven Development, 1852-1905

FAIN: FEL-281729-22

Matthew Potolsky
University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9049)

Research and writing leading to a book on the influence on global literature of English and French authors associated with the late 19th-century Decadence movement.

This project explores the origins and global diffusion of Decadent writing, a style closely associated with European high culture and often marked by elitism, reactionary politics, and Orientalist imagery, but which was nevertheless widely influential in colonial and so-called “developing” regions in the twentieth century. Looking at a wide range of works by canonical nineteenth-century European Decadents and by fin-de-siècle writers from the European periphery and British colonies who were among the first to adapt their work to new local contexts, I argue that Decadent writing provided powerful models for capturing the paradoxes of economic and political development.

Associated Products

Provincializing Decadence (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Provincializing Decadence
Author: Matthew Potolsky
Abstract: The notion of decadent style has long positioned the writers of the decadent movement as paragons of European high culture. In this presentation, I excavate an alternative nineteenth-century account of decadent style that traces it not to an internal crisis of modern urban society but to the equivocal condition of empire. First proposed by the Désiré Nisard in his analysis of the Roman epic poet Lucan, this account associates decadent style with the influence that eager new arrivals from the provinces had on metropolitan literary idioms. Beginning with brief account of Nisard, my presentation traces a line of commentary in writers from Baudelaire to Pater that understands decadent style as the products of imperial dynamics, not industrial modernity. It is a literary contact zone, defined by an embrace of uneven development. Welcoming the foreign and the provincial, it freely incorporates barbarisms, solecisms, anachronisms, and neologisms.
Date: 03/31/2023
Conference Name: Global Decadence, Race, and the Futures of Decadence Studies

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