Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and ‘correspondences’, rather than to realistically depict the world. … the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity....

The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on...

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in...

The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.

against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of...