Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860 – 1910
Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival
Dennis Denisoff
Casting fresh light on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, literature, ecological science and paganism, Decadent Ecology reveals the pervasive influence of decadence and paganism on modern understandings of nature and the environment, queer and feminist politics, national identities, and changing social hierarchies. Combining scholarship in the environmental humanities with aesthetic and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study digs into works by Simeon Solomon, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Arthur Machen and others to address trans-temporal, trans-species intimacy; the vagabondage of place; the erotics of decomposition; occult ecology; decadent feminism; and neo-paganism. Decadent Ecology reveals the mutually influential relationship of art and science during the formulation of modern ecological, environmental, evolutionary and trans-national discourses, while also highlighting the dissident dynamism of new and recuperative pagan spiritualities—primarily Celtic, Nordic-Germanic, Greco-Roman and Egyptian—in the framing of personal, social and national identities.
Dennis Denisoff is Ida Barnard McFarlin Chair of English and Film at The University of Tulsa and currently a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. Recipient of the President’s Award from both the Nineteenth Century Studies Association and the North American Victorian Studies Association, he is the author of numerous articles on literature, decadence, and sexuality, as well as author and editor of a range of books including Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840 – 1940 (2001) and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film, 1850 - 1950 (2004).
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