Decadent Poetics : Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siecle

Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe.

Decadent Poetics has gathered together some of the most important scholars working in Victorian studies, with the ten essays here exploring the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature''s formal characteristics. Invigorated by shifts in Victorian studies over the past ten years, this collection interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. The term ''poetics'' conveys here not just the prosodic, but the multiplicitous forms of cultural production across the fin de siècle. From perfume to the post-human, theatre to attenuated textualities, these essays explore the ways in which the literary intersects with its others in the period. The range of writers studied here moves from those who now constitute a decadent canon - Oscar Wilde, ''Michael Field'', Charles Baudelaire, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Ernest Dowson - to those whose work still inhabits the scholarly margins: A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen, Hubert Crackanthorpe and Graham R. Tomson.