Volupté is an MLA-indexed online journal of Decadence from antiquity to the present. It appears each year in Spring and Autumn, and brings together in themed issues creative and critical approaches to the fast-growing field of Decadence studies. The aim of Volupté is to enhance and broaden the scope of Decadence studies and stimulate discussion in relation to literary Decadence and other forms of discourse, including Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, and Science. Peer-reviewed essays and book reviews will be published alongside new translations, poetry, short fiction, and visual art. Based at Goldsmiths, University of London,Volupté is dedicated to promoting cutting-edge work by creative writers and artists and publishing the best research on Decadence by early career and established scholars.
Volupté 9.1 Estonian and Finnish Decadence: Full Issue
Full issue of Volupté 9.1 Estonian and Finnish Decadence
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 9.1 Estonian and Finnish Decadence
Review: Evanghélia Stead, Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Open Book Publishers, 2024)
In Evelyn Sharp’s story ‘A New Poster’, published in The Yellow Book in July 1895, Mrs Angelo Milton is at her wits’ end.[i] She is in love with ‘the new black and white artist’ Adrian Marks but loving him means giving up her fortune and her good name. Should she choose the bohemian love of this ‘dandy artist’, or the comfortable life promised by a steady man? Sharp’s story seems to dramatize a recognisably fin-de-siècle dilemma: that of the modern woman who must reckon with her own independence and the limitations of marriage. But in its depiction of a disreputable ‘decadent’ poster artist, appearing only months after the shock dismissal of Aubrey Beardsley from The Yellow Book, the story also stages a covert declaration of alliance to the disgraced poster artist. ‘A New Poster’ provides the striking opening to Evanghélia Stead’s study of Beardsley, inviting us to approach ‘Beardsley’ – that strange complex of image, word, and performance that fascinated the late nineteenth century – as a sum of many shifting parts. Nothing, Stead insists, ‘should be taken at face value’ (p. 5).[ii] [i] Evelyn Sharp, “A New Poster,” The Yellow Book, 6 (June 1895), pp. 123–66. [ii] Evanghélia Stead, Grotesques and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley (Open Book Publishers, 2024). All references are cited parenthetically in text.
Review: Sarah Parker, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024)
The work of recovering voices that have been marginalized – whether by dominant narratives of literary history or hierarchical discourses of gender, sexual orientation, and race, or both – requires painstaking archival research to forge innovative pathways from the present to the past. Reception history, in particular, read deftly against the grain by Sarah Parker in her new book, exposes the legacies of poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan truncated not only by misogyny but also periodization and ageism. A revisionist project, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own ‘sets out an alternative poetic history for the period 1895-1922, focusing on the twentieth-century careers of [these] women poets who continue to be primarily associated with the late nineteenth century’, as Parker elaborates in her erudite introduction richly framing the book’s thesis (p. 2).
Review: L. Onerva, Mirdja: A Decadent New Woman, trans. by Eva Buchwald (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2025)
In 2025 the English translation was published of L. Onerva’s Mirdja, a major Finnish decadent novel, which first appeared in 1908. The critical edition comprises the elegant prose translation by Eva Buchwald and an excellent, in-depth Introduction by Viola Parente-Čapková, who has also written the commentary accompanying the text. The volume also contains a selection of contemporary reviews of the novel. This is the first translation of Mirdja into one of the major languages.
Hasso Krull has been one of the most prominent voices of Estonian poetry since the 1990s. Krull has published twenty books of poetry and received numerous awards. His best-known work is the epic poem Meeter ja Demeeter [Metre and Demeter] (2004), which received the Baltic Assembly Literary Prize in 2005. Krull is a communitarian anarchist and his religious preferences tend towards the Estonian movement of the Maausk [Earth-believers]. Krull has been fighting against the ongoing deforestation of the Estonian landscape, including going to the European Court as a plaintiff to change the law of renewable energy in the EU, without any success. He has offered a conclusive overview of his ecological ideas in a short manual Tänapäeva askees [Modern Asceticism] (2020).
Johannes Semper’s ‘Püha umbrohi’ [‘A Sacred Weed’] (1918): The First Translation
Decadent Interart Aesthetics in Johannes Semper’s ‘A Sacred Weed’ (1918): Introduction to the First Translation
In the fast-paced, linguistically refined, and at times unmistakably comic decadent short story ‘Püha umbrohi’ [A Sacred Weed], first published in 1918, the globally unknown and locally rather misunderstood Estonian writer Johannes Semper (1892–1970)[i] draws the reader into a brief but emotionally and aesthetically intense period in the lives of two art-loving students. At the centre of the swift narrative stands Alla, a charismatic and unpredictable New Woman, whose unstable relationship with her fellow student Ado and a nameless officer drives the story forward. On top of beginning in medias res, the narrator keeps omitting personal pronouns to accelerate the overall tempo and carve out the uniqueness of Alla. This exclusion, which is tricky to express in English, emphasizes the impatient nature of the protagonist’s intimate ambitions and the restless originality of her creative potential. The shifting of viewpoints between Alla, Ado and the nameless narrator-artist – each with their own peculiar perspective – further enhances the text’s vibrant, hasty nature. [i] Johannes Semper and his work are often defined through his voluntary collaboration with the Soviet occupation forces since 1940. His preceding cultural achievements have oftentimes been overshadowed by this political choice and his open acknowledgement of Socialist Realism as a creative method. A brief overview about Semper’s life and œuvre can be found here: Katre Talviste, ‘On the Way Towards Modernity: An Estonian Poet’s Relationship with the City’, Interlitteraria, 12 (2007), pp. 361-70, <https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=224818> [accessed 25 February 2026].
The Poetics of Affect beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Prose Poetry of Jaan Oks
The most characteristically decadent author of Estonian culture during the early twentieth century was Jaan Oks (1884–1918), due to his poetics and his overall attunement to decline. Oks declared himself a decadent,[i] a status that was also affirmed by his contemporaries.[ii] Details of his biography – his mental instability, social marginalization, and torturous early death from osteoarticular tuberculosis – have also contributed to his reputation as a decadent. [i] Jaan Oks, Orjapojad (Ilmamaa, 2004), p. 283. [ii] Aino Kallas, ʻJaan Oksʼ, Siuru, 2 (1918), pp. 99-110.
Slave of a Harsh God: Nietzscheanism and the Nation in Joel Lehtonen’s Perm: Syysyön unelma
The less well-known debut work of classic Finnish author Joel Lehtonen (1881–1934) is the narrative poem Perm: Syysyön unelma [Perm: An Autumn Night’s Dream] (1904). It begins in a melancholic tone. The narrator tells the tale of a long-gone mythical past, a medieval Fenno-Ugric land known in Old Norse as Bjarmaland or Bjarmia, or Finnicized as Perma, which was believed to have existed on the coast of the White Sea or the Arctic Ocean.[i] [i] The folklorist and poet Martti Haavio has authored a study on the knowledge and beliefs associated with the land of Perma: Bjarmien vallan kukoistus ja tuho: historiaa ja runoutta, poems trans. by Aale Tynni (WSOY, 1965).
Revolution and Decadence in the Poetic Universe of Gustav Suits
In Estonia, Gustav Suits (1883–1956) is the first name to be associated with nationalism and literary innovation at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article will analyse his early poetry in connection with his political activities. Suits was the initiator of the Young Estonia movement [Noor-Eesti] (1905–1915) that focused on aesthetic innovation and brought into Estonian literature many new features that have been associated with decadent style. As John R. Reed has remarked, it is important to make a distinction between decadent style and decadent manner, because the former is a ‘verifiable technique’, while the latter is a loose combination of ‘idealistic yearning’ and ‘trappings’.[i] Although decadent style became more and more dominant in Suits’s poetry, decadent manner is notably missing – Suits obviously had no intention of épater le bourgeois with dirty details or perverse imagination. [i] See John R. Reed’s oft-quoted description of decadent style, in Decadent Style (Ohio University Press, 1988), p. 116.
Finnish Journeys Through Vitality and Depression: Uuno Eskola’s Self-Perception as an Artist and Social Climber
Uuno Eskola (1889–1958) was a young Finnish artist and writer who saw himself as a misfit, not belonging to any fixed community or social class. As an artist, he was certainly an outsider. Like many other young male artists who started their careers in the first two decades of the twentieth century, Eskola came from a rural background and was the child of uneducated parents. However, he was an aesthete and a dandy who was aware of his good looks and often posed for photographs. His writings, which reveal a sense of insecurity and a desire for life, fluctuate between confidence and despair. His paintings, on the other hand, are characterized by imagery associated with agrarian nationalism. He painted both rural landscapes and works inspired by the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.[i] [i] Uuno Eskola. Taiteellisen veren viettelys, ed. by Pirjo Juusela-Sarasmo, Tatu Jännäri, and Laura Luostarinen (Salo taidemuseo Publications 26, 2016).
The Ambivalent and Multifaceted Figure of the Upstart in A. H. Tammsaare’s Ma armastasin sakslast: A Search for the Right Interpretation of Life and Literature
H. Tammsaare’s (1878–1940)[i] novel Ma armastasin sakslast [I Loved a German] was originally published in 1935, at a time when the author was already an established and widely celebrated figure in Estonian literature.[ii] Traditionally, the novel has been interpreted as a love story between two protagonists belonging to nations with unequal symbolic status: an Estonian and a German. This interpretive approach is encouraged by the title itself and has typically been expanded to encompass the broader social context, addressing the intersections of class and culture, external and internal inhibitions, student life, and the emulation of Baltic German traditions. However, the novel’s complex structure and formal strategies, which amplify and deepen its intricate thematic concerns, have often been overlooked. Consequently, Ma armastasin sakslast has not yet been systematically situated within the tradition of literary decadence and the modernist currents from which it emerged. [i] For an explanation of the pen name A. H. Tammsaare, see endnote 3 in the article by Hinrikus and Rossi in this issue. Throughout the present article, however, we refer to the author simply as Tammsaare. [ii] In this article, we have used the original Estonian novel, A. H. Tammsaare’s Ma armastasin sakslast (Eesti Raamat, 1935, [1984]), and consulted the Finnish translation Rakastin saksalaista (Aviador, 2019), translated by Juhani Salokannel. The English translation of the novel used throughout this article is I Loved a German, translated by Christopher Moseley (Vagabond Voices, 2018). Unless otherwise indicated, all other English translations, including those from secondary sources, are our own.
Spiritual Naturalism in A. H. Tammsaare’s Kõrboja peremees
When A. H. Tammsaare (1878–1940)[i] completed Kõrboja peremees [The Master of Kõrboja] (1922), Estonia’s most canonized author was forty-four years old and had already enjoyed a literary career spanning nearly two decades. Frequently hailed as his first truly mature work, Kõrboja peremees is regarded as the novel in which Tammsaare discovered his authentic voice.[ii] Set in a distinctly Estonian rural landscape, the novel is often described as rooted in the realistic or naturalist tradition and saturated with (national) symbolism. Furthermore, this so-called authentic voice has also been described as lyrical, poetic, mystical, irrational, and decadent[iii] – qualities that challenge the conventions of the naturalist novel and its realistic representation.[iv] [i] A. H. Tammsaare was born as Anton Hansen. Around 1903, he began using the pseudonym “A. H. Tammsaare”, adopting the name of his family’s farm in central Estonia (Põhja-Tammsaare, or North Tammsaare). Thus, the initials “A. H.” refer not to the first names of the pseudonym, but to his birth name, Anton Hansen. For the sake of clarity and consistency, however, we refer to him simply as Tammsaare, following common practice in English-language scholarship. [ii] See Tõnu Õnnepalu, ʻSaateksʼ, in A. H. Tammsaare, Kõrboja peremees (Tänapäev, 2018), pp. 177-223, (p. 177). [iii] Epp Annus ʻKõrboja peremees – romaan väikese algustähegaʼ, A. H. Tammsaare, Kõrboja peremees (Avita, 2007), pp. 141-51; Toomas Haug, ʻA. H. T. lahkumine Koitjärvelt. Lapse sünd “Kõrboja peremehes”ʼ, Klassikute lahkumine. 25 kirjatööd (Eesti Keele Sihtasutus, 2010), pp 18-38; Mirjam Hinrikus, Dekadentlik modernsuskogemus A. H. Tammsaare ja nooreestlaste loomingus. Dissertationes litterarum et contemplationis comparativae Universitatis Tartuensis, 10 (Tartu ülikooli kirjastus, 2011); Maarja Vaino, Irratsionaalsuse poeetika A. H. Tammsaare loomingus, Tallinna ülikool. Humanitaarteaduste dissertatsioonid, 26 (Tallinna ülikooli kirjastus, 2011); Õnnepalu, ʻSaateksʼ, Aarne Merilai, ʻA. H. Tammsaare’s Epic Musicality’, Interlitteraria, 26.1 (2021), pp. 265-80. [iv] The setting of the novel can be described as an agrarian family epic, which links it to a set of metaphors recurring in narratives of the nation across literary traditions, such as the relationship between the people and the land. See Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2009), pp. 148-49. However, the fact that Tammsaare both mobilizes and challenges these metaphors in the spirit of decadence was already noted by his contemporary critics. In 1916, Tuglas argued that Tammsaare’s work published up to that point constituted a mixture of naturalism, neo-romanticism, and symbolism. See Friedebert Tuglas, ʻA. H. Tammsaareʼ, Kriitika III (Noor-Eesti, [1916] 1935), pp. 81-136. This assessment was later reiterated by several critics, including Gustav Suits, Eesti kirjanduslugu (Ilmamaa, [1936] 1999).
Decadence and the Making of the Nation in the Estonian and Finnish Context: An Introduction by the Guest Editors
The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in decadence has expanded the field beyond its traditional metropolitan focus on fin-de-siècle Paris, London, or Vienna.[i] Research on European regions long perceived as ‘peripheral’ from British or French perspectives has, of course, existed for decades. More recently, however, studies of Finnish, Estonian and, more broadly, Nordic decadence have gained increasing visibility within English-language academia, thereby expanding and reshaping the broader field of decadence studies.[ii] [i] See David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018). [ii] For example, Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Narkissos ja sfinksi: Minä ja toinen vuosisadanvaihteen kirjallisuudessa (SKS, 1997); Pirjo Lyytikäinen, ed., Changing Scenes: Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle (SKS, 2003); Mirjam Hinrikus, Dekadentlik modernsuskogemus A. H. Tammsaare ja nooreestlaste loomingus (Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2011); Viola Parente-Čapková, Decadent New Woman (Un)Bound: Mimetic Strategies in L. Onerva’s Mirdja (SKS, 2014); Mirjam Hinrikus, Lola Annabel Kass and Liis Pählapuu, eds, Kurja lillede lapsed. Eesti dekadentlik kunst. Children of the Flowers of Evil. Estonian Decadent Art (Eesti Kunstimuuseum, Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus, 2017); and Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus, eds, Nordic Literature of Decadence. Among the Victorians and Modernists, (Routledge, 2020).
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’.
Full Issue Volupté 8.2: The Decadent Fairy Tale
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 8.2 The Decadent Fairy Tale
Review: George Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, ed. by Matthew Creasy (Modern Humanities Research Association, 2025)
The publication of this new edition of George Moore’s kunstlerroman Confessions of a Young Man (French edition first published in 1886 and English edition in 1888) is a welcome chance for readers to become acquainted with a largely forgotten text of one of Ireland’s most influential Irish revival and pre-revival writers. The book is a partly fictionalized account of Moore’s experience of fin de siècle Paris and London. It fascinatingly blends the genres of autobiography, memoir, and novel writing in a manner that makes it an archetypal example of decadent literature and also a proto-Modernist text. The similarities with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) – which shall be examined shortly – extend far beyond the titles of both works.
Review: Chris Foss, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, Peculiar Bodies: Stories and Histories (University of Virginia Press, 2025)
Chris Foss’s The Importance of Being Different is the first monograph study of Oscar Wilde’s works from a disability studies perspective, perhaps one of the few lenses through which Wilde has yet to be extensively observed. Indeed, the study proposes to counteract the tendency in scholarship to read ‘Wilde’s nonnormative bodies […] simply as code for queer bodies’ and to explore ‘the nexus of the crip and the queer’ in Wilde’s writings (p. 16). Wilde’s fairy tales, in particular the stories from the collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), are presented as ‘fantastical reflections on the Victorian abjection of peculiar bodies’: a selfish giant, a living statue, a dwarf (Wilde’s term), witches, mermaids, fauns, talking animals, and gossiping flowers, as well as many other supernatural beings (p. 141). The Importance of Being Different therefore builds on major works in the field of Wilde studies – Jarlath Killeen’s The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (2007), Anne Markey’s Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (2011), and Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood (2017), edited by Joseph Bristow – and also the work of key scholars in disability studies, such as Kylee-Anne Hingston and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, to produce close literary readings of Wilde’s fairy tale texts attending to the extraordinary bodies foregrounded within them.
Review: The Vegan Tigress (2025), directed by Tracy Collier, Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham (18 February–1 March 2025)
The Vegan Tigress is a new play by Claire Parker, directed by Tracy Collier and performed by Claire Parker and Edie Campbell, that premiered at the Bread and Roses Theatre, Clapham, and ran from the 18 February–1 March 2025. This witty and vibrant celebration of the 175th anniversary of the birth of the fairy tale writer, Mary De Morgan (1850–1907) explores her later life through her interactions with a fictional, spectral antagonist named Lady Tuttle, and an imaginative reinterpretation of De Morgan’s own fairy tale ‘The Hair Tree’. Although a prolific and influential writer of literary fairy tales, and an active suffragist, De Morgan’s contribution to both the fairy tale genre and feminism has been largely overlooked. The Vegan Tigress seeks to remedy this by acknowledging the modern progressive value of De Morgan’s writing and feminist achievements.
Georges Eekhoud, Escal-Vigor (1899): A New Translation
Georges Eekhoud’s Escal-Vigor, first serialised in 1898 in the Mercure de France as ‘Le Comte de la Digue’ and published in full the following year, is a homoerotic and decadent novel that has only been translated into English once in the century since its publication.[i] The fairy-tale-like story follows Henry de Kehlmark, a young aristocrat who returns to his ancestral home of Escal-Vigor on the mythical island of Smaragdis, somewhere off the coast of the Low Countries. There he falls in love with the shepherd Guidon Govaertz, provoking the wrath of the villagers: in the novel’s dénouement, Guidon is murdered by a mob of local women, and Kehlmark dies of a broken heart alongside his beloved. My thanks to friends and colleagues Ms Marie Hervieu (professeur agrégé) and Ms Veronica Szafranski, as well as the anonymous reviewer and the editors for their comments and feedback on this translation. [i] Michael Rosenfeld, ‘Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud. Comment traduire l’innomable’, in Traduire la littérature belge francophone. Itinéraires des œuvres et des personnes, ed. by Béatrice Costa and Catherine Grevet (Éditions UMONS, 2016), pp. 25–40. Rosenfeld notes that two English editions of Escal-Vigor have been published, although both are essentially identical. The first appeared in 1909, published by Charles Carrington as Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud (Brussels: The Gutemberg Press); the full text is available online here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Escal_Vigor [last accessed 17/08/2025]. The second edition, published in the United States in the 1930s as A Strange Love. A Novel of Abnormal Passion (New York: Panurge Press, 1930), does not differ significantly in translation.
The Peculiar Case of the Jewelled Tortoise, or: Thoughts Towards a Jewellery of the Decadent Woman
A hunger for refinement, originality, and the will to bend nature to the artistic imagination: the transformation of a tortoise into a living jewel, as detailed in the fifth chapter of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, has become an iconic image of the decadent sensibility. That this living jewel became a reality, however – that life, quite literally, imitated art – is a fact barely known today; indeed, decadence itself seems to be a chapter curiously absent from jewellery history. Yet during the winter of 1897-98, tiny jewelled tortoises, harnessed in gold and glistening with precious stones, trod the corsages of daring Parisiennes and were readily recognised as a ‘joaillerie décadente’.[i] [i] Tiburge, ‘Causerie’, Les Veillées des Chaumières, 12 February 1898, pp. 237-38 (p. 238).
Carl Einstein’s ‘Leda’ as a Literary Fairy Tale about Decadence: Commentary, Translation, and Original Text
‘Leda’ by Carl Einstein (1885-1940) is a fragmentary sketch of a literary fairy tale (unpublished; probably written between 1905 and 1912) that repudiates its decadent sub-genre in the context of an early expressionist critique of human self-knowledge.[i] For the literary-historical study of decadence, it is of interest as an eccentric contribution to the critical appropriation of decadent forms in Modernist departures from the fin de siècle. [i] Carl Einstein, Leda, in Werke, 4 vols, ed. by Hermann Haarmann and Klaus Siebenhaar (Fannei & Walz, 1992-1996), vol. 4: Aus dem Nachlaß I (1992), pp. 64-70. The piece has received little attention in scholarship; the sexual problematics explored in this story are mentioned in passing in Klaus-Dieter Bergner, Natur und Technik in der Literatur des frühen Expressionismus (Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 225-67.
Fairy tales have always featured astonishing transformations. A girl in rags suddenly finds herself in evening dress, headed in a golden coach toward the ball at a palace; a prince becomes a Beast and, thanks to the love of a Beauty, resumes at last his original form; an entire kingdom falls into a deathlike trance, but is awakened when one sleeping maiden is kissed. Oscar Wilde’s own ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, first published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, contains an equally remarkable moment, when blood drained from the heart of a bird enters a white rosebush and turns to red the petals of a single blossom.
Created by performing an erasure of Renée Vivien’s ‘Prince Charming’ (1905), and leaving a violet-drenched account of female desire in its wake, this object poem invokes the fantastical qualities of the fairy tale to propel its audience into the decadent space of a transgressive, unruly body and its emancipatory, sensual metamorphosis.
It was the dead of winter. I had just moved to Paris, and had taken up a spare room in the apartment of my cousin in Montmartre. I had trained in painting, and though I dreamed of some kind of greatness and dizzying heights of beauty, I knew that I possessed no great genius. I found work designing illustrations for a London department store, but it was dull work, and it was not long before I tired of sketching compacts and perfume bottles.
Fear and Trembling: Oscar V. de L. Miłosz’s ‘La Reine des Serpents’ (1930) as a Decadent Fairy Tale
The Francophone-Lithuanian writer Oscar V. de L. Miłosz (1877-1939) considered his fairy tale ‘La Reine des serpents’ [‘Queen of Serpents’] so important that he published it twice, in both of his collections of Lithuanian Fairy Tales (1930, 1933).[i] ‘La conte si curiuex de la “Reine des Serpents”’ [The very curious tale of the ‘Queen of Serpents’], as he writes in the introduction to the first volume, ‘est tout à fait caractéristique […], et mériterait peut-être d’être rapproché de certaines théories scientifiques modernes relatives à l’origine animale des végétaux’ [is quite characteristic […] and would perhaps deserve to be compared to certain modern scientific theories relating to the animate origin of plant life.[ii] In this article I contextualize and closely read this text, a version of ‘Eglė Žalčių Karalienė’ [‘Eglė, Queen of Serpents’], which is best known as a ‘national’ folk tale of Lithuania.[iii] [i] O. V. de. L. Miłosz, Œuvres Complètes, 11 vols (Éditions A. Silvaire, 1963), ix, pp. 144. [ii] O. V. de L. Miłosz, Contes et fabliaux de la vieille Lithuanie (Éditions J. O. Fourcade, 1930), p. 6. All translations from french are the author’s, unless otherwise noted. [iii] Throughout this text, I use the Lithuanian formal name Eglė, rather than the French transcription (Eglé) to refer to the protagonist of both the folk tale and the fairy tale.
Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: The Aesthetically and Socially Engaged Child
‘Oscar Wilde and fairy tales? Putting the two in the same sentence has a jarring effect’ suggests fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar.[i] This has to do, in large part, with Wilde’s fame as a decadent author and an aesthete. While some have found Wilde’s choice of writing children’s literature, in the form of his fairy tales, a strange one, this interest in childhood is less surprising than one might think. Conceptualizations of childhood at the fin de siècle were influenced by lingering Romantic ideas of childhood built upon the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth[ii], as well as the budding psychological field of Child Study spearheaded in Britain by James Sully.[iii] Scholars in this field perceived the child as both evolutionarily ‘savage’ or animalistic and, also, Romantically imaginative, rebellious, and visionary. While older models of Romantic childhood, both savage and sweet, defined the child by simplicity, Wilde addressed child readers as an audience capable of understanding complex ironies, multilayered moral messages, and even open-ended problems in the world. Wilde uses fairy tales as pathways to engage the child reader with his critiques of the world as it is and his vision for the world as it could be. [i] Maria Tatar, ‘The Aesthetics of Altruism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 145-57 (p. 145). [ii] See, for example, Eric Tribunella and Carrie Hintz, Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (Broadview, 2019); Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Childhood Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840 – 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2010); James R. Kincaid, Child Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1992); Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Victoria Ford Smith, Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2017). [iii] James Sully. Studies of Childhood (Aberdeen University Press, 1896), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/cu31924055378305 [accessed 5 January 2026].
Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser as a Decadent Fairy Tale
In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, fairy tales were in vogue. The painter John Anster Fitzgerald saw his piece The Fairy’s Lake shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1866, and contributed various works to the Christmas editions of The Illustrated London News; for the stage, James Robinson Planché adapted the fairy tales of Madame D’Aulnoy to great success, and, by the 1890s, Andrew Lang’s ‘coloured’ Fairy Books were a staple of the middle-class nursery. [i] Perhaps inevitably, however, much discussion ensued as to what the fairy tale should do or be, and what they might inculcate in the child reader. [i] See John Anster Fitzgerald, The Fairy’s Lake, oil on board, exhibited 1866, Tate, London; Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and James Robinson Planché, Fairy Tales / by the Countess D’Aulnoy; Translated by J. R. Planché (George Routledge and Sons, 1855; reissued 1888); and Lang’s series of ‘coloured’ fairy tales, starting with The Blue Fairy Book (1888), which were originally published by Longmans, Green & Co.