ENL 6256 THEORIZING DECADENCE: IMAGES OF LATE-VICTORIAN MYTHOLOGIES

For a long time now, literary/cultural criticism has accepted the proposition that cultural paradigms and the social “narratives” supporting them are constructions of a particular historical moment, not natural laws.  It is therefore intriguing whenever modern criticism clings to ideological “mythologies” of distant historical periods, even as it ostensibly identifies such cultural paradigms as mythic constructions.  Some of the more striking examples of this kind of blind spot involve several of the cultural paradigms of the Victorian Period, not least the tenacious idea of a fin-de-siècle decadence.  This course will investigate the cultural assumptions underlying a few late-nineteenth-century mythologies, especially those founded on carefully coded representations of gender identity and invoking images of the grotesque.  It will not be our focus to explain why certain prejudices about the late-Victorian era have resisted normal revisionism, but along the way you may be able to draw some conclusions about that.

We will begin by reading a few twentieth-century critical discussions of Victorian ideas about the fin de siècle and its fears of degeneration, including the period of the 1890s routinely referred to as the Decadence, as well as some of the most famous criticism about certain supporting elements, such as the Woman Question, the Feminine Ideal, homosocial culture, and the Empire.  We will also read key Victorian commentaries touching on concepts of the grotesque and examine how the cultural paradigms they reference were embedded in a large number of Victorian poems, short fiction, plays, and visual images.  The visual images that bombarded the late-Victorian period will be considered as texts equal in interest to written texts.  

We’ll be studying works by both familiar and relatively unfamiliar (“non-canonical”) figures.  Among the specific figures we’ll study are John Ruskin; Walter Pater; the melodrama playwright Arthur Wing Pinero; the “sex-crazed” poet, fiction writer, and premier critic Arthur Symons; poet and playwright Michael Field (pseudonym for lesbian aunt-and-niece collaborators); the iconic lyric poet Ernest Dowson; the New Woman fiction writers George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Ella D’Arcy, and Victoria Cross; fiction writer Henry Harland (literary editor of the notorious Yellow Book); acclaimed poets John Gray and Lionel Johnson; poet and critic Richard Le Gallienne; women poets Mathilda Blind, Graham R. Tomson, Edith Nesbit, May Kendall, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge; and, of course, considerable material by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.
 

Program Status:  This course can be applied toward fulfilling part of the requirements for several possible program “tracks,” including but not limited to the Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies program tracks.