Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the Eighteen Nineties

Oscar Wilde said "It is personalities, not principles, that move the Age". This was never more true than of the Decadent movement of the 1890s, which remains one of the most vivid periods of English culture. Wilde was its prophet, Dowson its poet, Symons its critic and Beerbohm its satirist. This book analyzes the movement through the eyes and ideas of the people involved observing their achievements and the destructiveness of their ideals in this study of the end of the last century. From its early roots in France, Stugis describes the flourishing of Decadence in this country to its self-fulfilling and inevitable decline.