Decadent Conservatism

Abstract

Abstract British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of the art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this countercultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary, elitist, and nostalgic tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. This book offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatism turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organization that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, the book challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer War, this study offers a new and much messier picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as the social, political and cultural history of the period 1880–1920.