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WEIR, DAVID. Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 232 pp. $50.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.
As our century draws to a close, we are seeing the inevitable flurry of publications on issues of decadence and fin-de-siecle. The last end of the century has come to serve as both precursor and a mirror of our own; we become aware of our belatedness by projecting our preoccupations onto the late nineteenth century, which we then perceive to uncannily foreshadow our own concerns. Decadence and the Making of Modernism is the latest in a series of books that seeks to make a case for the significance of late nineteenth-century European decadence as a crucial stage in the emergence of modernity. The author's key thesis is two-fold. First, that the cultural importance of decadence lies less in its often lurid and sensationalist subject matter than in its innovations in literary form, which, he argues, play a crucial role in the formation of canonical modernism. Second, that decadence should not be seen as a minor and evanescent literary movement of the 1880s and '90s, but instead provides the key to understanding the literary production of the entire latter half of the nineteenth century. Decadence, in other words, should be recognized as a periodizing term of equal weight to romanticism and modernism, and indeed as constituting the bridge between them.
Weir begins with a helpful overview of most of the standard discussions of decadence, clarifying some of the manifest ambiguities of the...