Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Decolonizing Decadence: Full Issue
No full textDecadence studies has long recognized the relationship between literary and artistic decadence and an imaginary stance toward the decline of empires. Nevertheless, even when the decadents presented themselves as cosmopolitan critics of national artistic paradigms or jingoistic imperialisms, decadent art and literature has been suffused with colonialist tropes, a pervasive orientalism, and the persistent exoticization (if also celebration) of the Other. Indeed, much European decadent art and literature has been entranced by settler-colonial fantasies of extinct and vanishing peoples. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, Dorian collects strange instruments from ‘the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations.’ What would it mean, then, to ‘decolonize decadence,’ to decentre, ‘undiscipline,’ and displace literary and artistic imaginaries so enmeshed with Western myths of progress, decline, and racial degeneration? How can Decadence Studies and studies of aestheticism engage with concepts such as coloniality or highlight indigenous voices or epistemologies that might imagine decadence and aestheticism otherwise? How does decadent or anti-decadent writing think through the consequences of decadence (artistic, cultural, or historical) for the processes of political, cultural, or psychological decolonization? Moreover, how can Decadence Studies as a field take account of how decolonizing movements worldwide deployed decadence and related concepts to oppose Western influences, to devalue or disavow cultural production seen as too Western
Vernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Modern Morality, an Intermedial Mosaic
Get PDFVernon Lee’s The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915) documents the rise of nationalist discourses that led to World War I, as well as Lee’s zealous commitment to the promotion of pacifist values in contradiction to the rhetoric that had been fuelling the hostilities. The letter that she addressed to the secretary of the Women Suffrage Alliance, Rosika Schwimmer, which appeared in the Evening Post on 3 October 1914, is a blatant vindication of her activism. Besides stating the need for women across the world to take sides against the barbarity that was plaguing Europe, Lee offers a passionate summary of her engagement with contemporary politics
From Crystal Palace to the Grand-Guignol: Vernon Lee and the First World War
Get PDFIn July 1893, in a letter to her mother Matilda, Vernon Lee wrote that she would be attending the Crystal Palace exhibition in Sydenham, and whilst there she would ‘witness some Dahomey people war dance’. The promotional material, which featured heavily in the July, August, and September 1893 timetables of the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway, noted that the Dahomey were to be exhibited alongside ‘Prandi’s Royal Italian Marionettes’ as ‘The Greatest Novelty in Europe’. Across London, advertisements billed the Dahomey as
THE FAMOUS AMAZON WARRIORS,
A REGIMENT OF POWERFUL WOMEN,
Natives of Dahomey, the Suite of Behanxin, King of Dahomey, taken Prisoners by the French Army, under the command of General Dodds. The finest of the Races of Africa.
THE GREATEST NOVELTY IN EUROPE.
EXCITING MARTIAL DISPLAY. SHAM FIGHT. THRILLING SCENES
Disavowing Naidu: Nationalism and Decadent Poetics in India
Get PDFWhen I was first introduced to the work of Sarojini Naidu in my graduate class, ‘Globalization and Transnational Decadence’, I was shocked and uncomfortable – shocked because, in my twenty-plus years of education in India, I had only tangentially encountered Naidu’s poetry as ‘nationalist’, or at best, lyrically redolent of precolonial pastoralism; and uncomfortable, because the history of sexual excess, narcissism, and misogyny in decadent literature was sharply at odds with the Naidu I remembered from my middle school English classes. Intrigued by what I thought was a taxonomic inaccuracy, I reviewed the current curricula of a few top- and middle-tier Indian universities, which, predictably, yielded no surprises – Naidu is still being taught in India under modules that examine ‘themes such as nation-building, the politics of language, and the rewriting of history’[i] or ‘the polyphonic images of the Indian society’. While the University of Calcutta syllabus makes a passing reference to the ‘ambivalent attitude towards colonial resistance realized since the latter half of the nineteenth century’, the term ‘decadent’ – which faced conservative backlash after the widely publicized Oscar Wilde trials – is conveniently missing from prefatory accounts of Naidu’s poetry in India
Which Translation?: Identifying the True Source of Patten Wilson’s Shahnameh Illustrations
Get PDFRecent scholarship has stressed the influence of translation on late nineteenth-century literary and artistic developments (indeed, ‘Decadence and Translation’ was the theme of a Volupté special issue in 2020). Focusing on the British context, Annmarie Drury describes how English poetry at this time was ‘profoundly pervious, susceptible to historical-cultural currents arising from the territorial expansion and imperialist tensions that Britain experienced at the time’. Translators, in her phrase, ‘ministered to this susceptibility’, mediating foreign genres and prosodic forms that by their assimilation into anglophone literary culture both ‘tested’ and ‘transformed’ English poetry. Given the importance of translators at this time, and the potential ramifications of their decisions and methods in translation, an obvious question to ask when trying to gauge the reception of a single work of foreign literature by one individual British writer or artist is, ‘which translation were they using?’ Take the poetry of Sappho: until relatively recently, most translators of her ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ gendered the speaker’s beloved as male. But as early as 1835, the philologist Theodor Bergk proposed the opposite – a distinction of perhaps major significance for a contemporary reader into whose hands his translation happened to fall. Similarly, any scholar investigating a fin-de-siècle dramatist who was influenced by Ibsen is likely to consider which of the various English translations then available he or she consulted, and if both, then which was preferred. The subtle differences between Gosse’s and Archer’s versions are even the subject of a comic misunderstanding in J. M. Barrie’s 1891 farce, Ibsen’s Ghost, when it emerges that two characters in dialogue have been speaking their lines from variant play texts. If translational variants were conspicuous enough to be a subject for popular humour in the 1890s, then for us in the present they must be an object of serious enquiry
Review: Global Decadence, Race, and Futures of Decadence Studies Conference, Online, 31 March - 1 April 2023
Get PDFComments from the closing roundtable serve as the point of departure for our review of the ‘Global Decadence, Race, and the Future of Decadence Studies’ conference, held virtually from 31 March to 1 April 2023. Sponsored by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the University of Virginia Arts and the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost of the Arts, and the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, the event was a short but profound glimpse into the current state of the field of decadence studies. 
The Journal of Major General Robert Stearne of the Royal Regiment of Ireland
Get PDFThis article contains an analysis of Major General Robert Stearne’s journal of his service with the Royal Regiment of Ireland between 1678 and 1717. The article examines the provenance of the manuscript and addresses a major problem regarding its authenticity and relationship to the published accounts written by his regimental comrades. In so doing, it attempts to bring greater clarity to the question of its originality and to the sources that may have been used in its production. It then addresses the place of the journal within the historiography of the period and explores some of the new information that it contains