The Decadent Movement

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.

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Guests

• Neil Sammells 2 episodes
  Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
• Kate Hext No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
• Alex Murray No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University, Belfast

Reading list

• The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology
  Kostas Boyiopoulous, Yoonjoung Choi, Matthew Brinton Tildesley (eds.) (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
• Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle
  Linda Dowling (Princeton University Press, 1986)
• The Invention of Oscar Wilde
  Nicholas Frankel (Reaktion Books, 2021)
• Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet
  Richard Gilman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979)
• Decadence in the Age Modernism
  Kate Hext and Alex Murray (eds.) (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019)
• Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the Most Outrageous Trial of the Century
  Philip Hoare (Arcade Publishing, 2017)
• Against Nature
  Joris-Karl Huysmans (trans. Robert Baldick, Patrick McGuinness) (Penguin, 2003)
• The Hill of Dreams
  Arthur Machen (Pinnacle Press, 2017)
• Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence
  Kristin Mahoney (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
• Making Oscar Wilde
  Michele Mendelssohn (Oxford University Press, 2020)
• Decadence: A Literary History
  Alex Murray (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
• Studies in the History of the Renaissance
  Walter Pater (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• The Spectrum of Decadence: The Literature of the 1890s
  Murray G.H. Pittock (Routledge, 1993)
• Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women 1890-1914
  Angelique Richardson (ed.) (Penguin, 2005)
• Wilde Style: The Plays and Prose of Oscar Wilde
  Neil Sammells (Longman, 2000)
• Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the 1890s
  Matthew Sturgis (Pallas Athene, 2011)
• Selected Symons
  Arthur Symons (ed. Roger Holdsworth) (Carcanet, 1974)
• Decadence: A Very Short Introduction
  David Weir (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
  Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Related episodes

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  6 Dec, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
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• William Morris
  
  5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts
• The Later Romantics
  
  15 Apr, 2004 820 English and Old English literatures
• Taste
  
  25 Oct, 2007 700 Arts
• The Romantics
  
  12 Oct, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• Modern Culture
  
  21 Jan, 1999 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Literary Modernism
  
  26 Apr, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Dadaism
  
  19 Mar, 2026 700 Arts
• Sensation
  
  6 Nov, 2003 820 English and Old English literatures

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Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, in the 1890s the decadent movement flickered with a bright green flame in British culture with Oscar Wilde at its heart.