Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past

British Decadent literature was a radical attack on conventional morality and middle-class taste, its insistence on the autonomy of art and its exploration of sexuality, dissipation, and depravity at odds with the literary and social establishment. Yet this counter-cultural narrative has obscured the often reactionary and elitist tendencies of Decadent writers and artists of the fin de siècle. Decadent Conservatism offers the first in-depth examination of the intersection of Decadence and conservatism, arguing that underpinning both was the desire to find alternatives to liberal modernity. Both Decadents and conservatives turned to the past to uncover values and models of social organisation that could offer stability in a chaotic world. From well-known figures such as Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, through to the forgotten editors of short-lived periodicals, important female aesthetes such as Michael Field, and politicians such as Arthur Balfour, Decadent Conservatism challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the past in late-Victorian Britain. Through a series of thematic chapters exploring the alternative communities created by little magazines, the politics of Individualism, investments in monarchy and religion, Folk Decadence, and jingoistic and nationalist responses to the Second Anglo-Boer war, this study offers a new, and much messier, picture of fin-de-siècle literary politics. It will be of interest to those working on Victorian literature and modernism, as well as social, political, and cultural history of the period 1880-1920.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Conservatism and the Experience of Decadence 1: Alternative Communities: Decadent-Conservative Little Magazines 2: The Politics of Fin-de-Siècle Individualism 3: Throne-and-Altar Decadence 4: Folk Decadence 5: Decadence, Imperialism, and Jingoism Coda: Symons and the Superwomen

About the Author :
Alex Murray is Reader in Modern Literature at Queen's University Belfast. He has published widely on Decadent and modernist literatures, including Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin De Siècle (2016) and the edited collection Decadence: A Literary History (2020).

Review :
Decadent Conservatism makes an important contribution to contemporary attempts to rethink Decadence by expanding its canon, tracing its ramifications into the twentieth century and pushing its boundaries beyond London and metropolitan circles. I found Decadent Conservatism an extraordinary book... It is convincing and important, all the more so given that the conservatism it unearths is often distasteful from a contemporary point of view. For a considerable time to come, scholars will have to take account of Decadent Conservatism and the many insights Murray brings to bear on the period. Decadent Conservatism offers an important counterargument to the discourses of its field: the Decadents were not inherently progressive, nor motivated by a progressive worldview or any homogenous ideological framework. Whilst Murray does not reject readings of decadence as a tool of resistance, he provides a salutary reminder that writers and artists linked to decadence often held elitist and exclusionary political views that may now seem unpalatable. ... Decadent Conservatism does not resolve the 'notorious' difficulties of defining decadence, but it ably opens up those complexities to critical scrutiny and represents an important contribution to the expanding field of decadence studies.