Decadent Positionings: Decadence and the Literary Field

Abstract

Like Arthur Symons’s insistence on the inherently bourgeois nature of the Decadent project, James Ashcroft Noble’s accusation – that Decadents were far from economically disinterested – goes against the grain of traditional representations of these writers. The more familiar view is that represented in Moore’s idealized image of the ‘high priest’ – the disinterested martyr to art. It is this representation, not Noble’s, that has prevailed in literary histories of Decadence. My intention in this chapter is not to privilege one of these interpretations over the other, but rather to understand the relationship between them, to examine how these ‘fictions’ came to be constructed, and how the material conditions of the British fin-de-siècle literary field made it possible for such diametrically opposed images of the Decadent to circulate simultaneously. What is the relationship between the Decadent and the writer motivated by cash who caters to the mass reading public or, in other words, the popular writer? Between Decadent fiction and popular commercial fiction? And how do stereotypes of the popular writer figure in struggles for power among the literary élite? Finally, how might these relationships force us to rethink the ‘fiction’ of Decadence as élite art that has become part of our common understanding of the literary movement?