This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in Decadence by examining, together for the first time, the work of three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. In its overarching argument the book highlights an exasperating yet productive paradox that lies at the heart of Decadent poetics. On the one hand Decadence venerates the inaccessible, representational realm of artificiality; on the other hand it relishes ... More

This is the first book that exclusively attends to the Decadent poetry and poetics of the British fin de siècle. It explores culturally significant encounters between sensuality and artificiality in Decadence by examining, together for the first time, the work of three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson. In its overarching argument the book highlights an exasperating yet productive paradox that lies at the heart of Decadent poetics. On the one hand Decadence venerates the inaccessible, representational realm of artificiality; on the other hand it relishes sensuous experience in its immediacy as it is advocated by Walter Pater. This paradox is expressed in erotic encounters with statues, ‘soulless’ women, fetishes, landscapes, dead bodies, and texts. These encounters, the book suggests, develop in three stages: Wilde’s early and middle period poetry showcases the sensuality circumscribed in the frozen surface of art. With Symons the erotic encounter with artificiality reaches its apex as it is elevated to a fragmented, urban experience. In Dowson, through images of death, isolation and exhaustion, these encounters remain unrealised tragic possibilities. The book sees these Decadent poems as sites where the self, in the context of transgression, tends to become sensually immersed in and with their art and artifice. Aesthetic appreciation turns into Decadent participation in a foredoomed erotic experience ultimately with the very texture of language itself.