Overview

Decadence is seldom looked at in the context of colonialism, and yet its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s is directly contemporary with the expansion of France’s modern colonial empire. Ever a slippery signifier, Decadence figures alternately as pro-colonial, anticolonial and apolitical. This edited volume gives a sense of the sheer range and diversity of intersections between colonialism and Decadence, from anticolonial anarchist writers to colonial discourse, from nineteenth-century women writers to our contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. Different chapters explore these intersections in the cultural imagination of dance, the novel, travel writing, historiographical theory, and literary networks. Decadence is often seen as an essentially metropolitan, urban movement, but this study identifies key spaces elsewhere, from fin-de-siècle Saigon to India in the heyday of French colonialism, from Byzantium to ancient Persia. Although the colonies were held up by some as an antidote to the threat of French decline, other writings reveal anxiety that the antidote might itself be a form of poison. Colonial contact might exacerbate degeneration, whether through cultural mixing or through the violence of colonial aggression itself. A profound anxiety about French identity and France’s so-called mission civilisatrice is played out through the imagery, the style and the pose of Decadence.

Full Product Details

9781802070569

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘Hartley, Suwanwattana, and Yee’s French Decadence in a Global Context is an original work of intellectual curation that continues the project of opening up nineteenth-century French studies to colonial history and postcolonial theory… Picking out just a single thread among the chapters, the Decadent representation of sex/gender seems particularly promising for future scholarship in relation to the rich tradition of postcolonial thinking about the family romance.’ Richard Riddick, Cambridge University

Author Information

Julia Hartley is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Wanrug Suwanwattana is a Lecturer in French at Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand. Jennifer Yee is a Professor of Literature in French at the University of Oxford.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available