In a perverse paradox that its early devotees would have appreciated, the study of decadence is not in decline but is on the rise, as critics seek to account for the accomplishments of decadent writers beyond the movement’s rascally erotic thematics. Of course, the themes popular with nineteenth-century artists of decadent leanings encompass a vivid parade of Lotharios, femmes fatales, beautiful corpses, absinthe-drenched days and nights, depraved aristocrats, and opium-inhaling bachelors, not to mention louche locales, mephitic atmospherics, and an obsession with exotic arcana. The exquisite, insufferable Salomes and the delirious Christian martyrs so favored by decadent artists were beguilingly present in the early scholarly works on decadence: Mario Praz’s teeming catalog The Romantic Agony (1933), Richard Gilman’s slim but influential essay Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (1979), and Jean Pierrot’s book The Decadent Imagination, 1880–1900 (1981), all of which fixated on these florid subjects even as they failed to shape a strong, historically informed critical tradition concerning decadence, particularly in Anglo-American writing. Praz’s work was too short on ideas, while Gilman actually argued for jettisoning the term decadence, given its vexing conceptual fungibility, its status as simply the detestable obverse of whoever and whatever at a given moment was valorized.In the last two decades a number of scholars—Emily Apter, Stephen Arata, Charles Bernheimer, Elaine Showalter, and David Weir, among others—have explored decadence in terms of turn-of-the-century disease, degeneration, hysteria, psychoanalysis, and anxieties about homosexuality, syphilis, and prostitution, often drawing on gender and sexuality studies, feminist criticism, and queer theory. But until now few critics have measured the achievements of decadent writers—formal, philosophical, historiographical—in terms of the movement’s modernist afterlife. As the received critical wisdom ran, decadence was (as John Updike somewhere put it) a “mauve interregnum” lying between a glorious Victorian epoch and a modernist flowering. It was no surprise, really, since was not decadence always proclaiming its own imminent death, with so many of its acolytes—Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde himself—dying young?Both Vincent Sherry and Matthew Potolsky question this critical consensus. Sherry’s study opens with the British critic Arthur Symons’s decision in 1899 to rewrite his book-length 1893 essay The Decadent Movement in Literature and retitle it The Symbolist Movement in Literature on the grounds that the term decadence was mired in imprecision. Symons’s substitution establishes the terms for modernism’s subsequent denial of its steadfast reliance on decadent poetics. Where the 1893 Harper’s essay extolled Paul Verlaine’s “exquisite depravity,” Symons now celebrates the poet’s self-suffering and spiritual quest. Symons had hailed À Rebours as “the breviary of the decadence,” but his revised essay also relegates that novel to the status of a minor text, perhaps because its protagonist’s conversion to Catholicism seems merely aesthetic. In the revision Huysmans’s late-in-life Catholic conversion emerges as the culmination of the writer’s career (Symons 1919: 265).With Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle (1931), once again symbolism prevails over decadence, bypassing the disgraced Wilde to link symbolism to a progressive era’s socially positivist agenda. “When [Wilson] first names the ‘decadents,’ then, he lifts them out of his text on the tweezers of those inverted commas, holding them at an arm’s-length’s safety zone” (16). More bafflingly, the New Critics, who conceivably could have appreciated a Wildean aesthetics of detachment, gave short shrift to decadent poetics. There is an essay, unmentioned by Sherry, that suggests why. Written by Yvor Winters, “Decadence and Primitivism: A Study in Experimental American Poetry” (1937) claims that while the decadent poet (Hart Crane is here the exemplary case) displays a “fine sensitivity to language” and “may have a very wide scope,” his “work is incomplete formally . . . or is . . . weakened by a vice of feeling (in the manner of the better post-romantic ironists)” (Winters 1947: 90–91).Still, Sherry demonstrates that decadence’s influence on modernist minds was persistent. At times there is a fascinating sense that a central aim of modernism was to complete what the 1890s decadents had fitfully begun. This is one reason that Sherry ranges so widely in accounts of T. S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, Djuna Barnes (for whose 1936 Nightwood Eliot wrote an admiring introduction, thereby signaling the endurance of youthful decadent allegiances), and Samuel Beckett, whose Malone/Malloy trilogy of the early 1950s, with its “mechanical tour-de-forceless energy,” is the comic apotheosis of decadent dreams (286). Sherry also draws in Karl Marx (who regarded the nineteenth-century dandy as a stylized throwback to Roman decadence) and Sigmund Freud (whose notion of the “death drive” owes a debt to the decadent sensibility), as well as Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, who both see decadence as a gesture of mourning for the death of revolutionary ideals that allows progressive politics to be reborn. From the decadents, according to Sherry, modernists inherited their end-of-the-world attitudes and their rejection of temporal progress.In Sherry’s meticulous reading, “The Waste Land” is a veritable archive of decadent evasiveness and allusiveness, some of it evident in Pound’s editing of the manuscript. Beyond their poorly disguised reliance on decadent tropes and allusions, most modernist writers came to believe that the historical catastrophe of the Great War legitimized the decadent images of doomed youth and apocalyptic despair, paving the way for decadence’s robust afterlife in a twentieth century of worldwide military slaughter, destroyed cities, somnambulant survivors, and shattered hopes.The spirit of Wilde lived on, meanwhile, in The Wings of the Dove, where, as Sherry demonstrates, James kept alive Wildean precepts regarding the deception entailed in all artistic endeavors. James’s plotting lovers Kate and Merton aestheticize their morally compromised (i.e., mostly financial) interest in the sickly American heiress Milly Theale, and the pleasures of “discovery”—sexual, emotional, linguistic—in the exultant prose narrating their Venetian iniquity, as Sherry shows, help define the experimental excitement of James’s brand of modernism. With Pound, that new experiment takes the form of a fondness for a precious Latinity, so popular with the nineties crowd that Pound liked to excoriate, in order to so much better fashion what Sherry succinctly calls the poet’s “anti-modern modernism” (206).The eagle-eyed, densely argued grand tour is leavened by some fetching bon mots, for instance about Symons’s “Yeatsian moody broody” and about Georg Lukács “hurl[ing]” the word decadence, “like the Olympian thunderbolt, from the highest plane of his Marxist historiography” (76, 51). Sherry’s study is somewhat limited, though, by its strictly literary comprehension of symbolism. Symbolist painting’s antirealist and antimaterialist biases, antipositivism, and absorption in hidden, recondite, and unconscious states established a foundation in such twentieth-century art movements as cubism, Jugendstil, expressionism, surrealism, fauvism, futurism, and abstract expressionism. Works of literature evoke one another in Sherry’s account, or they reference actual history, but they seldom consort with works from the other arts. Another limitation is the short shrift given to Joyce, who often invoked his fellow Irishman Wilde and who, with his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, found inspiration in The Picture of Dorian Gray (a novel of aesthetic education whose central idea Joyce [1966: 150] described in a 1906 letter to his brother as, despite its “lies and epigrams,” “fantastic”). The illimitable catechismic lists of the “Ithaca” chapter in Ulysses, meanwhile, force a cessation of narrative that would make any decadent writer proud. Still, within its broad scope Sherry’s original and indispensable book gamely uncoils the tangled chords linking decadent and modernist aesthetics.Potolsky’s study The Decadent Republic of Letters also flares forth as a boldly revisionary account of literary decadence in its exploration of numerous nineteenth-century French, British, and American writers, primarily Charles Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley, Théophile Gautier, Vernon Lee, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Pater, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. Potolsky argues against those critics who construe decadence as reactionary, backward-looking, hyperindividualistic, and politically nihilistic. He discerns a range of politically complex formulations that decadent writers create, none of them reducible to a familiar strand of conservative ideology. In complex, coded ways, decadent writing mainly opposed two distinctly modern phenomena, bourgeois liberalism and unchecked nationalism. In place of consumerism, orientalism, self-cultivated despair, and elitist nostalgia, Potolsky discovers in decadent writers internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and visionary social aspirations. It always has been evident how the structure of the self-enclosed cenacles of decadence set the terms for self-regarding modernist coteries. Less apparent until Potolsky’s account has been the forward-looking, antinationalist agenda of the “decadent republic.”The Decadent Republic of Letters begins with a consideration of Baudelaire’s devotion to Poe, whom Baudelaire came to see as a martyr for an antibourgeois, antiphilistine politics related to the monarchist political philosopher Joseph de Maistre, the influential defender of a state dominated by “throne and altar.” Potolsky shows how Baudelaire drew on some of Maistre’s counter-Enlightenment politics to revitalize the aesthetic realm. His second chapter depicts Baudelaire as the progenitor of a new, “republican” decadence, rather than as the wholly reactionary writer for whom he is often taken. In their praise of Baudelaire, Swinburne and Gautier expressed appreciation for his aesthetic and political example, creating a kind of brotherhood of antibourgeois aesthetes and decadents, far from the elitism commonly attributed to decadence. As part of an antinationalist “cosmopolitan alternative to national literary traditions” (77), À Rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray envision something like Michael Warner’s (2002) queer “counterpublic,” in contrast to the reactionary faux cosmopolitanism of Max Nordau’s best-selling Degeneration (1892), which (as Sherry notes) uses decadence interchangeably with degeneration. Like Balzac’s “decadent epideictic” (8), this counterpublic promoted a “mimetic canonization” (91), the making of new canons based on other canons. This is evident in the protracted cataloging of exemplary, arcane books in À Rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray. In such a way do Huysmans and Wilde transform aesthetic reception into a new means of production. Dorian Gray, in particular, “makes mimetic canonization the subject of his story” and “provides a microhistory of the relationship between canon formation and identity formation” (97). Potolsky offers a refreshing view of cosmopolitanism as engagé, implicitly challenging Amanda Anderson’s (2001) contention that a cosmopolitan perspective exists beyond—or wills to transcend—a politics of commitment.Subsequent chapters, then, concern the dominant role of pedagogical relations in works by Pater, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Rachilde, Lee, and Wilde and “communal visions” in Lee’s study of the Renaissance Euphorion, Pater’s never-completed historical novel Gaston de Latour, and Beardsley’s unfinished pornographic tale “The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser.” Here, as earlier, Potolsky’s quickening scope, detail, and originality are astonishing. Always stimulated, I nevertheless wanted the book to pursue its thesis with other writers. Absent, for example, is the French writer Octave Mirbeau (mentioned en passant in the chapter on catalogs), who offers a rich demonstration of Potolsky’s argument. Once a reactionary writer, Mirbeau became an anarchist and a Dreyfusard, railing at nationalist anti-Semitism. Mirbeau’s fiction—particularly The Torture Garden, Diary of a Chambermaid (given new life in a 2016 French movie, one of several film adaptions, which suggests the resonance today of French decadent writing), and the semiautobiographical anti-bildungsroman Sebastian Roch—represents an unusually forceful effort to fashion a class-conscious, anti-Catholic political decadence. I found myself wondering how Mirbeau’s anarchist radicalism consorted with, but perhaps also challenged, Potolsky’s decadent republic. Missing, too, in these pages is Lautréamont, master of surrealist cruelties. But these are small reservations. True decadents, after all, loathe encyclopedias, those bulging monstrosities of uncurated knowledge. It makes sense, then, that Potolsky would have his own breviary of the decadence, which is to say, his own decadent canon.The path-clearing intellectual force and appealing consanguinity of these two very different studies make it amply clear that the study of decadence is generating new critical avenues for addressing formal issues as they are determined by political and historical actualities. Both books coincide with a number of other valuable scholarly studies, like Jason David Hall and Alex Murray’s excellent edited collection, Decadent Poetics (2015), which considers decadence in terms of its neglected formal innovations, and Kristin Mahoney’s Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (2016), an inspired examination of Lee, Baron Corvo, and Max Beerbohm, among other “post-Victorians,” which emphasizes the British movement’s acute attunement to contemporary political realities, often through parody (as in P. R. Stephenson and C. Bower Alcock’s 1928 lampoon The Sink of Solitude, a verse send-up of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness). In short, decadent studies would seem to be at a decisive point similar to that of modernist studies in the 1990s, when a monolithic “modernism” was toppled in the wake of scholarly accounts accentuating diverse, contradictory strains. With the new decadent studies, a thousand fleurs are blooming, and, to say the very least, none of them are all that mal.