For for peter, of course, he saw it in less hedonistic ways than other people did. But young undergraduates and a random assortssortment of aspirants were enraptured. The renaissance comes in becausea pater is writing about the renaissance. That's what you're referring to. This from the beginning, this appears to be dominated by men. Are women associated with it in any significant way? Women didn't play a central role in the movement. And yet, and yet, we really can't grasp british decadence if we think of it as purely a homosocial movement. There wasa significant practical involvement of female writers. Novelists
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.
The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.
With
Neil Sammells
Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
Kate Hext
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
And
Alex Murray
Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson