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The Decadent Movement which flourished in the 1890s produced some of Europe's most striking and exotic works of literature. The Decadents, convinced that civilisation was in a state of terminal decline, refused to rebel as the Romantics had, but set forth instead to cultivate the pleasures of calculated perversity and to seek the artificial paradise of drug-induced hallucination.
J.-K. Huysmans described Decadence as a 'black feast' and The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence offers a veritable banquet, with offerings from the major practitioners in France and England. It completes Brian Stableford seminal two-volume study of the decadent movement.

Dedalus

Decadence from Dedalus

The Second Dedalus Book of Decadence: The Black Feast

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

One novella and 6 stories dealing with identity and solitude

Great Shadow: (and other stories)

Gabriele D'annunzio

Decadent fin-de-siecle novel about aristocratic Romans, made into a film by Visconti.

L'Innocente: The Victim

Georgina Harding

Octave Mirbeau

Clara goes to China where she experiences the delights of the torture garden. Baroque sadism mioxed up with political satire. 'A century after its first publication, this book is still capable of shocking. The opening satire is probably meaningful only to scholars of French political history, but the subsequent journey into the Far East accentuates connections between love and death, sex and depravity, fastidiousness and pleasure. And the petty, parochial corruptions of the narrator are put into context by the immersion into the Sadeian world of the Torture Garden.' The Times

Torture Garden

Michael Richardson

Brian Stableford

Jean Lorrain

Francis Amery

Modelled on The Portrait of Dorian Gray it is the summation of french decadence. Monsieur de Phocas ranks with A Rebours as the summation of the French Decadent Movement. It will appeal strongly to readers of Oscar Wilde and fin-de-siecle fiction

Monsieur de Phocas

Douglas Jarman

Richard Ings

Celestine becomes as corrupt as the men who uses her in this satire of French society. The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. Mirbeau brings a journalist's analytical eye to Celestine's adventures as she loses her innocence and becomes as corrupt and depraved as the men who exploited her. Since its publication in 1900 it has never ceased to shock and fascinate its readers and has been made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1946 and Luis Bunuel in 1964.