Abstract
In the autumn of 1895, despite the hostile climate for Decadence in the wake of the Wilde trials, Arthur Machen began work on The Hill of Dreams (written 1895–97; published 1907). He was determined to write an artistic novel, one that would not be governed by the demands of the marketplace. In this respect, he produced a novel that accorded with Symons’s 1893 characterization of high art Decadence as the ‘morbid subtlety of analysis … and curiosity of form’, and as ‘a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul’.1 These elements made the novel unpublishable when it was written, though Machen did try to place it. His failure in this regard supports what I have argued throughout and what Havelock Ellis sensed in 1889: Britain was simply not receptive to Decadence in the terms in which so many of the writers I have been discussing wanted to pursue it as a literary form.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Copyright information
© 2006 Kirsten MacLeod
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
MacLeod, K. (2006). Decadence in the Shadow of the Wilde Trials and Beyond. In: Fictions of British Decadence. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504004_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230504004_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54765-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-50400-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)