In 19 54, a to celebrate the centenary of wilde's birth, is a very modest series of events. But once the 19 sixties comes round, a new generation have discovered decadence for themselves. A much more permissive culture really does embrace decadence. And so you've got the sort of interest that pop stars and rock and roll stars have with decadence. You could think of david bowey or morrisy, fans of oscar wilde and decadence. It still exerts a vevery a strong pull on the arts, but lithing more broadly on the idea of the artist as the rebel who is pushing back against social conformism. This is something
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