Decadent Movement

The Decadent movement was a late nineteenth-century literary and artistic current, centered in France and spreading to Britain and elsewhere, that celebrated artifice, sensory refinement, moral transgression and a self-conscious sense of civilizational exhaustion or decline, taking its name from critics who used decadence pejoratively before writers embraced the label themselves. Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal is generally treated as its foundational text, and the movement's central figures include Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel A rebours (Against Nature) became its defining prose work, and in Britain, Oscar Wilde and the circle around The Yellow Book periodical. Closely intertwined with, and sometimes treated as overlapping, both Symbolism and Aestheticism, Decadent writing prized elaborate style, exotic and morbid imagery, and a deliberate inversion of conventional bourgeois morality and taste, and the movement's cultivated pose of world-weary refinement became a defining sensibility of the fin de siecle before giving way to Modernism in the early twentieth century.