Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Preface by the Editor-in-Chief
No full textOnce upon a time there was no such thing as a decadent fairy tale. People throughout the land read fairy stories to their children at bed-time, but no one thought to question the presence of queer monsters, poisonous flora, and violent and subversive animals, even less the fetishisation of hair and feet, the uncontrollable cravings of mothers and step-mothers, and the disproportionate number of half-humans and secret hothouse chambers. No one thought to question the excess of sugar in the forest house of Hansel and Gretel, the ruinous eloquence of wolves, or the large number of bleeding women
Charming
Full text linkCreated by performing an erasure of Renée Vivien’s ‘Prince Charming’ (1905), and leaving a violet-drenched account of female desire in its wake, this object poem invokes the fantastical qualities of the fairy tale to propel its audience into the decadent space of a transgressive, unruly body and its emancipatory, sensual metamorphosis. 
Review: The Vegan Tigress (2025), directed by Tracy Collier, Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham (18 February–1 March 2025)
Full text linkThe Vegan Tigress is a new play by Claire Parker, directed by Tracy Collier and performed by Claire Parker and Edie Campbell, that premiered at the Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham, and ran from the 18 February–1 March 2025. This witty and vibrant celebration of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the fairy tale writer, Mary De Morgan (1850–1907) explores her later life through her interactions with a fictional, spectral antagonist named Lady Tuttle, and an imaginative reinterpretation of De Morgan’s own fairy tale ‘The Hair Tree’. Although a prolific and influential writer of literary fairy tales, and an active suffragist, De Morgan’s contribution to both the fairy tale genre and feminism has been largely overlooked. The Vegan Tigress seeks to remedy this by acknowledging the modern progressive value of De Morgan’s writing and feminist achievements. 
Review: Chris Foss, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories (University of Virginia Press, 2025)
Full text linkChris Foss’s The Importance of Being Different is the first monograph study of Oscar Wilde’s works from a disability studies perspective, perhaps one of the few lenses through which Wilde has yet to be extensively observed. Indeed, the study proposes to counteract the tendency in scholarship to read ‘Wilde’s nonnormative bodies […] simply as code for queer bodies’ and to explore ‘the nexus of the crip and the queer’ in Wilde’s writings (p. 16). Wilde’s fairy tales, in particular the stories from the collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), are presented as ‘fantastical reflections on the Victorian abjection of peculiar bodies’: a selfish giant, a living statue, a dwarf (Wilde’s term), witches, mermaids, fauns, talking animals, and gossiping flowers, as well as many other supernatural beings (p. 141). The Importance of Being Different therefore builds on major works in the field of Wilde studies – Jarlath Killeen’s The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2007), Anne Markey’s Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (2011), and Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood (2017), edited by Joseph Bristow – and also the work of key scholars in disability studies, such as Kylee-Anne Hingston and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, to produce close literary readings of Wilde’s fairy tale texts attending to the extraordinary bodies foregrounded within them. 
La Serre
Full text linkIt was the dead of winter. I had just moved to Paris, and had taken up a spare room in the apartment of my cousin in Montmartre. I had trained in painting, and though I dreamed of some kind of greatness and dizzying heights of beauty, I knew that I possessed no great genius. I found work designing illustrations for a London department store, but it was dull work, and it was not long before I tired of sketching compacts and perfume bottles
Fear and Trembling: Oscar V. de L. Miłosz’s ‘La Reine des Serpents’ (1930) as a Decadent Fairy Tale
Full text linkThe Francophone-Lithuanian writer Oscar V. de L. Miłosz (1877-1939) considered his fairy tale ‘La Reine des serpents’ [‘Queen of Serpents’] so important that he published it twice, in both of his collections of Lithuanian Fairy Tales (1930, 1933).[i] ‘La conte si curiuex de la “Reine des Serpents”’ [The very curious tale of the ‘Queen of Serpents’], as he writes in the introduction to the first volume, ‘est tout à fait caractéristique […], et mériterait peut-être d’être rapproché de certaines théories scientifiques modernes relatives à l’origine animale des végétaux’ [is quite characteristic […] and would perhaps deserve to be compared to certain modern scientific theories relating to the animate origin of plant life.[ii] In this article I contextualize and closely read this text, a version of ‘Eglė Žalčių Karalienė’ [‘Eglė, Queen of Serpents’], which is best known as a ‘national’ folk tale of Lithuania.[iii]
[i] O. V. de. L. Miłosz, Œuvres Complètes, 11 vols (Éditions A. Silvaire, 1963), ix, pp. 144.
[ii] O. V. de L. Miłosz, Contes et fabliaux de la vieille Lithuanie (Éditions J. O. Fourcade, 1930), p. 6. All translations from french are the author’s, unless otherwise noted.
[iii] Throughout this text, I use the Lithuanian formal name Eglė, rather than the French transcription (Eglé) to refer to the protagonist of both the folk tale and the fairy tale
Full Issue Volupté 8.2: The Decadent Fairy Tale
No full textFull Issue Volupté 8.2: The Decadent Fairy Tal
Carl Einstein’s ‘Leda’ as a Literary Fairy Tale about Decadence: Commentary, Translation, and Original Text
Full text link‘Leda’ by Carl Einstein (1885-1940) is a fragmentary sketch of a literary fairy tale (unpublished; probably written between 1905 and 1912) that repudiates its decadent sub-genre in the context of an early expressionist critique of human self-knowledge.[i] For the literary-historical study of decadence, it is of interest as an eccentric contribution to the critical appropriation of decadent forms in Modernist departures from the fin de siècle.
[i] Carl Einstein, Leda, in Werke, 4 vols, ed. by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Fannei & Walz, 1992-1996), vol. 4: Aus dem Nachlaß I (1992), pp. 64-70. The piece has received little attention in scholarship; the sexual problematics explored in this story are mentioned in passing in Klaus-Dieter Bergner, Natur und Technik in der Literatur des frühen Expressionismus (Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 225-67
Review: George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, ed. by Matthew Creasy (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2025)
Full text linkThe publication of this new edition of George Moore’s kunstlerroman Confessions of a Young Man (French edition first published in 1886 and English edition in 1888) is a welcome chance for readers to become acquainted with a largely forgotten text of one of Ireland’s most influential Irish revival and pre-revival writers. The book is a partly fictionalized account of Moore’s experience of fin de siècle Paris and London. It fascinatingly blends the genres of autobiography, memoir, and novel writing in a manner that makes it an archetypal example of decadent literature and also a proto-Modernist text. The similarities with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – which shall be examined shortly – extend far beyond the titles of both works