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.
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.
‘Strangely at Home in Fairyland’: The Faun in Laurence Housman’s Garden
In his 1983 study of the illustrator and writer Laurence Housman (1865-1959), Rodney Engen affirms the centrality of fairy tales to his artistic and personal life on its first page. Housman, Engen writes, was ‘a true romantic with a childish love of fantasy’, one who ‘learned to turn his sensitive, private nature into an escapist world filled with fairies… [and later] recalled how essential those fantasies were to his struggles’.[i] To support this characterization, Engen quotes from Housman’s musings on the purpose of fairy tales and from critical reactions to his works. ‘The true end and object of a fairy tale is the expression of the joy of living’, Housman argues, so for the true and unpolluted air of fairyland we have to go back to the old and artless tales of a day purer and simpler than our own; purer because so wholly unconcerned with any questions of morals, simpler because so wholly unconscious of its simplicity.[ii] Despite its apparent remoteness, however, at least one critic – the writer and editor Charles Kains Jackson – found Housman’s work suggestive of the fact that he was ‘strangely at home in fairyland’.[iii] [i] Rodney Engen, Laurence Housman (Catalpa Press, 1983), p. 11. Currently, this is the only biography of Housman (1865-1959). [ii] Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60. [iii] Charles Kains Jackson, quoted in Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60.
Unhappily Ever After: Surface, Queer Bachelorhood, and Occidental Desire in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s ‘The Siren’s Lament’ (1917)
What becomes of the fairy tale when world-weary bachelors and aesthetic exiles enter its enchanted terrain? In the decadent tradition, the happy endings and moral certainties of the genre begin to dissolve. The arc of wish fulfilment gives way to ennui, longing, and the restless pursuit of unattainable beauty. This shift in tone and focus found an enduring embodiment in the figure of the eccentric dandy bachelor, first portrayed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in À rebours (1884) and later refined by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). More than a stock character, he became a vehicle for transnational reworkings of the fairy tale within a decadent mode.
Anachronistic Decadence in an Antique Nineteenth-Century ‘Fairy Tale’: Walter Pater and Errol Le Cain’s Cupid and Psyche
In 1977, Errol Le Cain (1941-1989) illustrated Walter Pater’s retelling of the story of ‘Cupid and Psyche’.[i] Le Cain was a British animator and children’s book illustrator who was born in Singapore, where he spent most of his childhood, as well as in India. He is best known for his illustrations of numerous fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, as well as Russian and Chinese folktales. In addition to these fairy tales, he also illustrated literary works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Pater’s version of Cupid and Psyche. The story originates as a frame narrative in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass (second century CE), but Pater recontextualized it through his own translation in his only completed novel Marius the Epicurean (1885). For Le Cain’s illustrated version, the text, as translated and altered by Pater, was again shortened and adapted to better suit the intended younger audience. Although Le Cain’s work is set in the twentieth century, a clear decadent influence is evident in his ‘Cupid and Psyche’, While Pater was not a decadent writer per say, his work reflects aesthetic and decadent ideas. [i] I am grateful to Maximilian Le Cain for granting permission to reproduce Errol Le Cain’s illustrations for Cupid and Psyche.
‘[I]n the midst of fierce forces’: Orientalizing Decadence in A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994)
The closing and titular novella in A. S. Byatt’s collection of five fairy stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), introduces an unlikely decadent heroine, the narratologist Gillian Perholt, ‘an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power’.[i] The fairy tale plays with the tropes of the 1001 Nights (also referred to as The Arabian Nights), and wish-fulfilling lamps (found in associated tales such as ‘Aladdin’), as Gillian finds a glass bottle containing a djinn in an Istanbul market. The world in Byatt’s novella is one she understood and constructed through a variety of sources, by reading The Arabian Nights and undertaking academic research related to the tales, and through dialogue with fellow writers, notably the Turkish poet Cevat Çapan (pp. 279-80). Gillian’s encounter with the ‘Oriental Daimon’, largely staged in her hotel room, involves the granting of three wishes: one for Gillian’s body to be restored to a younger version of herself; another, that the djinn might fall in love with her; and a third, gifted back to djinn for his freedom (p. 206). [i] A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (Vintage, 1995), pp. 104-05. Subsequent references to the novel are given inline.
The Decadent Fairy Tale: An Introduction by the Guest Editors
How can a fairy tale be ‘decadent’? The question itself highlights the seemingly oppositional nature of the fairy tale tradition and decadence. On first reading, the former appears to be organized around principles of conservatism, moralism and narrative resolution; the classic ‘happily ever after’ now synonymous with the numerous cinematic fairy tale adaptations led by Walt Disney. In literary fairy tales such as ‘La belle au bois dormant’ [‘Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’] (1697) by Charles Perrault, the union of the prince and princess and their establishment of a domestic family life stands as a symbolic means to reinscribe a heteronormative social order threatened by an ogress. In ‘La Belle et la Bête’ [‘Beauty and the Beast’] (1740) by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the Beast’s human transformation is catalysed by the love and compassion evinced by Beauty, highlighting the importance of her moral virtue. Nor is this drive towards upholding the heteronormative as a moral and social ideal solely confirmed to the French tradition of contes des fées. In the Grimms’ ‘Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot’ [‘Snow White and Rose Red’] (1815), the titular Snow White helps a bear who later magically transforms into a prince bridegroom, while her sister agrees to marry the prince’s brother. In contrast, decadence is concerned with concepts of sexual dissidence, sexual contagion, and social degeneracy, with ideas and forms that result in visual and literary imagery of transgressive queer couplings, poisoned lineages, and families in states of decline.
Once upon a time there was no such thing as a decadent fairy tale. People throughout the land read fairy stories to their children at bed-time, but no one thought to question the presence of queer monsters, poisonous flora, and violent and subversive animals, even less the fetishisation of hair and feet, the uncontrollable cravings of mothers and step-mothers, and the disproportionate number of half-humans and secret hothouse chambers. No one thought to question the excess of sugar in the forest house of Hansel and Gretel, the ruinous eloquence of wolves, or the large number of bleeding women.
Full Issue Volupté 8.1: Lafcadio Hearn
Notes on Contributors to Volupté 8.1, Lafcadio Hearn (Autumn 2025)
Review: ‘Kwaidan: Encounters with Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904)’, Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin, 7 March-24 August 2025
The Kwaidan Exhibition project emerged from an invitation from Irish artist Stephen Lawlor to forty artists, twenty Japan-based and twenty Ireland-based, to create prints inspired by their choice of text from one of Lafcadio Hearn’s best-known works, completed in the year of his death in Tokyo in 1904. No stranger to curating collective creative crossovers between literature and the visual arts, Lawlor had previously organized an exhibition of the work of Irish writers and artists inspired by Hearn’s contemporary, the Irish ‘Celtic Twilight’ poet and Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats. Indeed, it was while presenting this latter exhibition in Japan in 2017 that he first encountered Hearn’s potent aura.
Review: Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025)
Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature draws on diverse literary genres – ‘the French novel, the modernist novella in proximity to the German Bildungsroman or the Anglo-Saxon short or ghost story’[i] – to explore how the ‘poetic aestheticization’ of Japan played a crucial role within ‘an “eclectic” adoption of modernity’ in fin-de-siècle literature both from Japan and the West (p. 1, p. 6). Following in the footsteps of Japanese studies scholars such as Rachael Hutchinson and Mark Williams (Representing the Other in Modern Japanese Literature, 2006), Fukuzawa argues that a ‘mutual process of exoticism and autoexoticism’ shaped ‘the transnational modernization process in Meiji Japan (1868-1912)’ (p. 2). This work is therefore a valuable addition to the trend, carried by scholars such as Stefano Evangelista and Jennifer Yee, approaching Japonisme and exoticism as multipolar phenomena at the intersection of discourses on colonialism, modernity, and self-identity. [i] Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa, Japan and Japonisme in Late Nineteenth Century Literature (Routledge, 2025), p. 212. All subsequent references are provided inline.
Lafcadio Hearn and His American Biographers
American biographies bookend – and dominate – the voluminous range of writings about Lafcadio Hearn published since his death in 1904, extending from Elizabeth Bisland’s important foundational study, The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906) to more recent treatments such as Steve Kemme’s The Outsider: The Life and Work of Lafcadio Hearn (2023). Examining this long tradition now allows us to bring into sharper focus the significance of two major preoccupations in Hearn’s reception – national identity and race – and to critically evaluate the ways in which American biographers have framed the distinctiveness of Hearn’s life and achievement in their work.[i] [i] For a brief treatment of this topic see Paul Murray, ‘Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904)’, The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature 16 (Samhain 2020), pp. 70–71.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Lafcadio Hearn’: A New Translation
Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s short essay ‘Lafcadio Hearn’ (1904) provides a brief but powerful insight into the resonance of Hearn’s Japanese writing for European decadent and modernist writing in the early twentieth century. Writers and artists turning to Japan since the mid nineteenth century were building on a history of transnational engagements between East Asia and Central Europe, as well as long-established artistic and intellectual practices of European Orientalism.[i] Studies of japonisme have demonstrated the specific place that Japan held in German and Austrian imaginations by 1900, especially in Hofmannsthal’s Vienna.[ii] As European knowledge of Japanese art and culture developed over the nineteenth century, Hearn’s work fuelled fascination with both the ‘old Japan’ and contemporary Japanese life.[iii] Hofmannsthal’s essay shows this tension in his response to Hearn’s work: his elegiac tone in describing ancient Japanese spiritual practices is combined with stark images of the ongoing Russo-Japanese War, his condescending praise of Japanese intellectuals placed alongside weary dissatisfaction with the ‘burden’ of Western culture. [i] See especially Joanne Miyang Cho, Lee M. Roberts, and Christian W. Spang, eds, Transnational Encounters between Germany and Japan: Perceptions of Partnership in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). On German and Austrian orientalism in this period more broadly, see Todd Kontje, German Orientalisms (University of Michigan Press, 2004); Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Katharina Herold-Zanker, Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880–1920: ‘The Indispensable East’ (Oxford University Press, 2024). [ii] Mirjam Dénes, Györgyi Fajcsák, Piotr Spławski, and Toshio Watanabe, eds, Japonisme in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Arts, 2020), and Aglaja Kempf, ‘Oskar Kokoschka und der Japonismus: Wien um 1900 und die japanische Ästhetik’, in Oskar Kokoschka: Neue Einblicke und Perspektiven, ed. by Régine Bonnefoit and Bernadette Reinhold (de Gruyter, 2021), pp. 402–20. [iii] See Kathleen M. Webb, Lafcadio Hearn and his German Critics: An Examination of His Appeal (Lang, 1984), and Gerhard Schepers, ‘Exoticism in Early Twentieth-Century German Literature on Japan’, in Japanese-German Relations, 1895–1945, ed. by Christian W. Spang and Rolf-Harald Wippich (Routledge, 2006), pp. 98–116.
The Anatomy of Curiosity and Cosmopolitanism: Lafcadio Hearn’s Medical Imagination
A decade before he made a one-way journey to Japan in 1890, in an article entitled ‘Travel An Educating Influence’ (1880), Lafcadio Hearn, the inquisitive young journalist then working for the New Orleans Item, declared his departure from conventional ideas of nationalism, and instead determined to make ‘one step toward a new and vast movement’ of cosmopolitanism.[i] Rather than abolishing local and historical peculiarities or going back to old nationalistic provincialism, Hearn pleaded for cosmopolitanism by way of curiosity – the insatiable ‘desire or inclination to know or learn about anything’, especially what is novel or strange.[ii] Recent work on Hearn’s cosmopolitanism, by Stefano Evagelista and others, has brought to light the manner in which this characteristic curiosity attached itself to the art, literature, and religious practices of the cultures he encountered.[iii] However, it has tended to overlook the central place of the medical and the scientific in Hearn’s transnational imagination. [i] Hearn, ‘Travel An Educating Influence’, Item (6 February 1880), in Buying Christmas Toys and Other Essays, ed. by Ichiro Nishizaki (Hokuseido, 1939), pp. 31–34 (p. 32). [ii] See the entry ‘curiosity’ (I.5.b) in the Oxford English Dictionary <https://www.oed.com> [accessed 10 July 2025]. [iii] Stefano Evangelista, ‘Lafcadio Hearn and Global Aestheticism’, in Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 72–116.
‘Peculiar, Exotic, Irresistible’: Exotic Decay and the Fantasy of Enslaved Beauty in Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890)
What role do racialized women play in the articulation of decadent aesthetics in the colonial Caribbean? This article takes up that question by turning to Lafcadio Hearn’s Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), a text that registers both fascination and ambivalence toward Creole culture in the wake of emancipation. Hearn is best known as a cosmopolitan figure whose work traverses the US South, the Caribbean, and Japan. Yet while much of the critical attention on Hearn has focused on his global mobility, folkloric ethnography, and Japonisme, his writing in and about the French West Indies has received less sustained analysis. In particular, scholars have yet to fully reckon with the aesthetic and ideological weight he places on the figure of the femme de couleur – a mixed-race woman whose beauty, agency, and racial proximity to whiteness make her a potent figure of both desire and decline.
‘Hand and Soul’: Japanese Craft and Embodied Spirituality in Lafcadio Hearn’s Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897)
Reporting on the Jidai Matsuri festival to celebrate the eleven hundredth anniversary of the foundation of Kyōto in October 1895, Lafcadio Hearn describes finding himself confronted by a dizzying array of crafts. ‘I saw a young man writing Buddhist texts and drawing horses with his feet’, Hearn recalled, noting his admiration also for ‘Butterflies of paper’, ‘maidens “made by glamour out of flowers”’ and an ‘artificial cuttlefish’ which could ‘move all its tentacles’ when air was blown into ‘a little rush tube fixed under its head’.[i] Sent to the festival by the Japan Chronicle, Hearn documented the city’s ‘festive appearance’: ‘A committee has been appointed which has decorated almost every street in the city with lanterns and flags, and […] the town wears a most holiday-like appearance’.[ii] When he expanded his taut reportage into a later article for the Atlantic, republished in his essay collection Gleanings in Buddha-Fields (1897), Hearn focused especially on the handicrafts he had encountered. [i] Lafcadio Hearn, ‘A Trip to Kyōto’, Atlantic, 77 (May 1896), pp. 613–24 (p. 617). Hearn quotes Alfred Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Edward Moxon, 1895), p. 40. [ii] Hearn, ‘The Kyoto Memorial Festival’, Japan Chronicle, 26 October 1895; typescript by P. D. Perkins held in Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), MS 6101.