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ENGL 451: Decadents, Dandies and New Women

In a letter to his friend Eduard Bertz in 1893, novelist George Gissing called for “a period of . . . sexual anarchy” to address the so-called woman question, particularly “the crass imbecility of the typical woman,” which he believed was a consequence of women’s “lack of education, in all senses of the word.”  For Elaine Showalter writing a century later, Gissing’s call for revolution encapsulates the spirit of the final decades of the nineteenth century, and it provides a signpost for our study of the literature and culture of the period.  The turbulent fin de siècle was the age of Aestheticism, Decadence, “degeneracy,” the blossoming of socialism, the avant-garde literature of the Yellow Book, the fomenting of the campaign for women’s suffrage, high-profile legal trials that seemed to realize Gissing’s call for anarchic sexuality, and other apparent threats to the status quo.  Representations of decadents, dandies, New Women, and other contentious figures proliferated in literature, art, and popular culture, contributing to disruptive discourses concerned with changing perceptions of gender, sexuality, the body, self-expression, class, race, the role of the family, and the relationship between the individual and the larger social body.

Like Showalter in her seminal 1990 book Sexual Anarchy, our course will explore “the myths, metaphors, and images of sexual [and other] crises and apocalypse that . . .marked. . .the late nineteenth century.”   Readings may include novels and short stories by writers from England and abroad such as Grant Allen, Mona Caird, Kate Chopin, Marie Corelli, Victoria Cross, Ella Hepworth Dixon, George du Maurier, George Egerton, George Gissing, Sarah Grand, Joris-Karl Huysmans, or Oscar Wilde.  Additionally, since the literature of the day is inseparable from other arts and from popular culture, we will consider the visual culture and aesthetic landscape of the fin de siècle, including artistic movements such as Impressionism and Expressionism; work by popular and controversial artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; and illustrations in periodicals such as Punch magazine.  

Showalter reminds us that “[in] periods of cultural insecurity, when there are fears of regression and degeneration, the longing for strict border controls around the definition of gender, as well as race, class, and nationality, becomes especially intense.”  Accordingly, although our course will focus on the literature and culture of the late nineteenth century, it may also speak to our current political and cultural crises, amidst the intensification of calls “for strict. . . controls” of literal and figurative borders.  Perhaps by gaining insight into our past, we may arm ourselves with a new vantage on our present, and from there, begin to envision a brighter future.