Landscapes of Decadence Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle

The challenges posed by Decadence to Victorian moral conventions - particularly sexual - have been well documented, but this book makes the case for understanding Decadence as a response to the ways in which place was accorded moral value in the period. The book uses landscape as a key trope for exploring Decadent writing's approach to location and identity. Drawing on a wide range of fin-de-siècle literature organised around a series of locations from Naples to New York, Murray argues that Decadent writers developed a form of landscape and place-based writing using a series of stylistic features to challenge the increasing homogenisation of both place and literary culture. Decadence and the literature of the fin de siècle are re-framed as a politically-engaged form of landscape writing. This is an ambitious and richly researched study.

1. Landscapes of Decadence: reading sermons in stone; 2. The disappearing ghosts of Naples; 3. Paris and London, world-flowers twain; 4. Stirring the Cumnor cowslips in Decadent Oxford; 5. The glowing furnace of Decadent Wales; 6. Venice, sans hope: reading Decadent New York.

Alex Murray teaches in the School of English at Queen's University Belfast. His research focuses mainly on Decadence and the writing of the fin de siècle, literature and place (particularly London, New York and Paris), travel writing, modernism, and literary and critical theory. Most recently he has co-edited Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (2013), and has written a number of articles on the relationship between Decadence and the literature of the early-twentieth century in MFS Modern Fiction Studies and Modernism/modernity. His monograph, Giorgio Agamben (2010), is printed in four languages.