Preface

Abstract

In perfect continuity with the previous issue of Volupté (8.2) and its focus on the fairy tale, this current issue steeps its readers in the magical and mythic realms of Estonian and Finnish decadence. We encounter dark forests and deep lakes, symbolic of the darker and deeper emotional states of isolation, ecstasy, disgust, and despair. Old worlds are ambivalently and affectively tied to accelerated states of transition and change and are succeeded by new, young Nordic nations that feel ‘the appeal of the metropolis and a strong urge to participate in European trends’. We are invited to explore the (Euro)peripheries of the Baltic and Nordic countries and the interconnections between fin-de-siècle culture and nationalism and between different forms of nationalism and decadent literature and art. ‘[D]ecadent aesthetics in these contexts’, our guest editors argue, ‘were neither merely derivative nor belated imitations of metropolitan models, but active reconfigurations shaped by processes of nation-building, cultural translation, and uneven modernization’.