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The Decadent Novel

This article argues that the decadent novel purposefully inverts the conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel. Rather than developing bourgeois interiority, cultivating moral sympathy, and promoting conventional ideologies of gender and romance, the decadent novel focuses on detached individuals and damaging forms of desire. Refusing to provide reassuring narratives that reinforce myths of progress or camouflage the fractured, fraught nature of modern experience, these texts force readers to confront the anguish produced by modern conditions. They ask readers to meditate on the manner in which the increasing emphasis on individuation and an escalating sense of fragmentation at the turn of the century distort subjectivity and enable ever more horrifying forms of cruelty. In their representations of isolation and sadism, decadent novels amplify and exaggerate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forms of alienation in a way that enables further reflection on the dehumanization and deprivation engendered by modernity.