Review: Robert Azzarello, Three Hundred Years of Decadence: New Orleans Literature and the Transatlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019)

Abstract

As Robert Azzarello expresses in Three Hundred Years of Decadence, when embodied in human form, decadence evokes a tableau of pleasure, indulgence, and excess – a decadent is someone ‘who has had too much – too much nicotine or caffeine, too much liquor or morphine, too much literature or philosophy or art – and is thus reduced to a state of being that seems to oscillate between comatose and enlightened.’ The decadent individual is almost always a late nineteenth-century western European, a Parisian or Londoner who has read ‘too much’ Baudelaire or Wilde and consumed ‘too much’ absinthe. However, as Azzarello argues in this groundbreaking work, the decadent tradition also has a long, if yet unexcavated, tradition in the United States. To date, most of what has been studied focuses on a coterie of fin-de-siècle, transatlantic American poets, novelists and critics including James Huneker, Vance Thompson, Robert William Chambers, Vincent O’Sullivan, David Park Barnitz, and brothers Edgar and Francis Saltus, all of whom spent time in Paris and London at the turn of the twentieth century and were heavily influenced by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. After returning to the United States, they attempted to popularize the decadent tradition through their own works, but were generally unsuccessful. Today, these American decadents remain unknown and understudied, with the exception of a few contributions to the secondary literature such as David Weir’s books, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995) and Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (2008).