Introduction

The papers in this special section were originally presented at the Decadence: Ancient and Modern conference, at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom, on July 12-15, 2003. The conference brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the notion of decadence across scholarly fields and historical periods. The presenters came from classics, modern literary studies, art history, and history, and represented a wide range of interests and approaches. The papers published here focus on an issue that returned often during the conference: the uses of decadence as a paradigm for explaining historical, artistic, and social change.

Scholars have long noted the intrication of decadence with ideas of history, change, and transition. Such ideas are implicit in the word itself. Etymologically, decadence means to fall down or from (from the Latin de + cadere). By definition, it describes a temporal contrast or comparison. A body, a society, or an artistic form falls away from something prior and better: health, virtue, tradition, and so forth. Richard Gilman has gone so far as to argue that decadence is nothing more than a relational term, that it is empty outside of the specific comparative context in which it is used. Decadence, Gilman writes, is "an unstable word and concept, whose significations and weights continually change in response to shifts in morals, social and cultural attitudes, and even technology."¹ Gilman's claim probably goes too far: decadence has long named a recognizable (albeit shifting) constellation of ideas and metaphors, from the imagery of imperial Rome and the femme fatale, to sensual indulgence, philosophical pessimism, and sexual nonconformity.²

Yet this constellation is remarkably, perhaps suspiciously, adaptable in its uses as a historical explanation. Eighteenth-century historians such as the Baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon first adapted the idea of decadence to describe the fall of the Roman Empire. In 1834, the French literary critic Désiré Nisard brought the word into aesthetic discourse with his Études de moeurs et de critique sur les poètes Latins de la décadence, which attacked the French romantics by comparing their work to the discredited corpus of "decadent" late Latin literature. Writing just two decades later, however, Charles Baudelaire turned the logic of Nisard's analogy to his own ends. If literary decadence is indeed an organic affliction, he argues in "Further Notes on Edgar Poe" (1857), then decadent poets have little choice but to accept their ineluctable fate: "[I]t is entirely unfair to blame us for accomplishing such a mysterious law."³ By the turn of the nineteenth century—the period of its greatest dissemination—the concept of decadence could figure a striking array of changes, from the decline of bodily health and the loss of social cohesion to the increasing linguistic complexity of modern poetry. Each kind of decadent change could seemingly serve as a metaphor for any other. Thus Théophile Gautier famously compared the complexities of Baudelaire's decadent style with the "extreme maturity" of old age, "passion grown depraved," and "the slanting suns of aged civilizations."⁴ Decadent writing encouraged such crossings of organic, literary, psychological, and political metaphors for change.

It is, perhaps, just this conceptual looseness that has rendered decadence little more than a historical relic. The notion is so adaptable, so open to contradictory appropriations, that it seems more a cluster of metaphors and allusions than a unified political or philosophical position.⁵ As a consequence, decadence survives today mostly as a marketing category, describing spa vacations and rich chocolate cakes. It has lost any force as a historical concept. Of course, even in the nineteenth century, decadence more often served as a fashion statement or derogatory epithet than as a rigorous theory of history. But as the papers in this section collectively suggest, the twentieth-century decay of decadence as a way of talking about historical change has tended to leave scholars with a limited and sometimes stereotypical sense of what the word could mean for the artists, writers, and philosophers who used it. The prevailing tendency among earlier scholars of decadence to distance themselves from their troubling subject matter has only served to obscure further...