Decadent Form

A heightened attention to questions of narrative form is characteristic both of decadent writing and of writing about decadence over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This essay examines some key aesthetic issues that are routed through the issue of form in the period, with particular attention to the writings of Henry James, an astute theorist of narrative form and ambivalent fellow-traveller with fin-de-siècle decadent writers. In his own fiction, as well as in his critical essays on writers such as Flaubert, James at once dramatizes and theorizes the phantasmatic pull of formal “perfection” in the novel.