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Decadence as historical myth and cultural theory

This article traces the early history of the concept of European decadence with special emphasis on its manifestations in French literary production in the period between 1860 and 1900. It argues that decadence was not a historical reality, but a cultural myth, that gave expression to a new, specifically urban experience of modernity first thematized in Baudelaire's poetry and prose work. It further claims that this concept continues to have important contemporary relevance in the form of debates about the “second modernity” and the new “cosmopolitanism.”