History of English and American Literature: The Last Romantics: Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s

This course focuses on the literature of the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century, that are often characterised by their aestheticism (that is, their pursuit of what Oscar Wilde famously called “art for art’s sake,” to the neglect of social, political, and other concerns) and by their decadence (their supposed ethical and moral squalor, their literary and cultural decay or decline).  This is literature at the end of the line: at the end of the British Empire; at the end of the great European intellectual movement known as Romanticism; and, because of the advent of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” associated with radical thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin, at the end of certainty, whether about oneself or the world at large.  The writers we will examine are therefore probing, questioning, doubting and challenging writers, whether they address identity, intimate and social relations, orthodoxy and ideology, or gender and colonial politics.