The five-week summer seminar titled “The Decadent 1890s: English Literary Culture and the Fin de Siècle” will bring together fifteen college-level instructors with the aim of deepening their knowledge of a comparatively brief but creatively dynamic period of literary history that bridges the Victorian and Modernist eras. The chief intellectual objective of the seminar is to show that the 1890s is not a decade that should always be celebrated for the drug-induced excesses long associated with its more bohemian excesses. Even if late-Victorian commentators readily stigmatized and derided terms such as “fin-de-siècle” and “decadent” when confronting a challenging body of literary of avant-garde writing (some of which took its inspiration from French Symbolisme), this does not mean that the more experimental elements of the 1890s should be discounted as a misguided episode in the years preceding major Modernists such as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound. Nor was it an era that only featured the pitifully “Tragic Generation” of prematurely dead writers that W.B. Yeats looked back upon with not a little condescension in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), some years after he had achieved considerable reputation for his great poetry. Yeats, it is worth noting, found his feet as a poet among many of the decadent figures who belonged to the Rhymers’ Club (notably Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and Arthur Symons), and it was in these club members’ two noteworthy anthologies that some of his finest early poems—such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—appeared in book form.
Moreover, the 1890s was the age in which the immensely influential author and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley thrived, often by provoking his contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde. At the same time, this fast-paced decade brought to public attention a rich variety of writings by women, some of whom (such as George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne] and Michael Field [Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper]) were among the most sexually courageous and formally experimental of their time. At the moment, histories of English literature still tend to treat the 1890s rather dismissively. The editors of the most recent Norton anthology, published in 2000, declare that “[a] studied languor, a weary sophistication, a search for new ways of titillating jaded palates can be found in both the poetry and the prose of the period.” The main purpose of this seminar will be to present much more balanced assessments of why this era deserves serious critical attention for the ways in which fin-de-siècle literary culture tried—and, in many respects, succeeded in—breaking with its Victorian antecedents. With that aim in mind, the participants will become acquainted with a growing body of new scholarship that is involved in serious reassessment of this intense, highly productive period of English literary history. Writers included in the broad-ranging syllabus include Grant Allen, Vernon Lee, Alice Meynell, Dollie Radford, and the contributors to the two journals most closely linked with Decadence—The Yellow Book and The Savoy.