Guest Editors’ Introduction to Neo-Victorian Decadence: Questions, Trajectories, Paradigms

Abstract

Neo-Victorian decadence is one of the most fascinating and complex areas of scholarly research, lying at the core of an extremely lively debate where literature, history, the fine and the applied arts, the entertainment industry, and new and digital media converge. This is hardly surprising when one thinks of the clusters of ideas conveyed by the adjective ‘neo-Victorian’ coupled with the noun ‘decadence’. The conventions and the idiosyncrasies of decadent and Victorian cultures are subsumed under a label whose complexity is only enhanced by the prefix ‘neo-’. On the one hand, neo-Victorian decadence unambiguously recalls the tension between history and the present, or between historicism and presentism, that Frederic Jameson construed as a pivot of postmodern literature and its cannibalization of past styles.[i] On the other hand, however, this attitude to the past demands self-conscious acts of ‘(re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision’[ii] that are as hard to pinpoint as ‘Victorian’ and ‘decadence’ are hard to define from a critical viewpoint.

[i] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 18.

[ii] Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewelyn, Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 4 (emphasis in the original).