Welcome to the
Decadent Web
"To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
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Welcome to the
Decadent Web |
"To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." Walter Pater, The Renaissance |
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The Decadent Web is an introduction to
literary decadence--its philosophies, poetries, and genealogies.
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A Timeline
1842 Bulwer-Lytton writes his masonic thriller Zanoni. 1857 Baudelaire publishes Les Fleurs du Mal. 1869 Suez Canal completed. 1870 Dickens dies. 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. Bulwer-Lytton publishes The Coming Race. 1871 Darwin publishes Descent of Man. Germany is unified. 1873 Pater publishes The Renaissance 1874 Disraeli becomes Prime Minister for the second time. 1875 H. P. Blavatsky found Theosophical Society in New York. 1876 Disraeli names Queen Victoria the Empress of India. 1877 Thomas Edison invents phonograph. 1880 Swinburne publishes Heptalogia. 1881 Benjamin Disraeli dies. 1883 Fabian Society founded. 1884 Joris-Karl Huysmans publishes A Rebours 1884/85 Otto von Bismark invites colonial powers to Berlin Conference. This conference marks the beginning of the 'scramble for Africa'. 1885 Gross Indecency Act--prohibits any sexual touching between men. H. Rider Haggard publishes King Solomon's Mines. 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson publishes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Krafft-Ebbing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis. 1887 Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. H. Rider Haggard publishes She. 1888 Jack the Ripper murders five London prostitutes. 1890 William Morris publishes News from Nowhere. 1891 Wilde publishes The Picture of Dorian Gray. Rhymers club first gathers. Members include John Davidson, Ernest Dowson and W.B. Yeats. J. K. Huysmans publishes La Bas. 1892 Max Nordau publishes Degeneration. 1894 Walter Pater dies. Wilde publishes Salome, Aubrey Beardsley illustrates. The Yellow Book is established in London. Dreyfus trial in France. Arthur Machen publishes The Great God Pan. George du Maurier publishes Trilby. Notorious decadent Count Eric Stenbock publishes his Studies in Death. 1895 The Wilde Trials. Some see this year as the end of the British Decadent Movement. H. G. Wells publishes The Time Machine. 1896 H. G. Wells publishes The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1897 Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Bram Stoker publishes Dracula. 1898 Aubrey Beardsley dies in France. 1899 Joseph Conrad first publishes Heart of Darkness. 1899-1902 The Boer War. 1900 Oscar Wilde dies in Paris. 1901 Queen Victoria dies. Accession of Edward VII. Edward rules until 1910. Rudyard Kipling publishes Kim. 1912 Arthur Conan Doyle publishes the Lost World. Excerpts "Decadence itself, is nothing to be fought: it is absolutely necessary and belongs to every age and to every people. What should be fought vigorously is the contagion of the healthy parts of the organism." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. "The most representative literature of the day...is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with with that old antithesis of the Classic, the Romantic. After a fashion, it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity." Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature."
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Uploaded 18 December 2004 © 2004 L. A. Delgado 
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