Decadence

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Decadence, also known as the Decadent Movement, can be understood as a subsection of the Aesthetic movement, emerging as an extreme manifestation of Symbolism towards the end of the nineteenth century.^[1] Like Aestheticism's emphasis on "art for art's sake," the Decadents moved further away from traditional artistic concerns with morality and classical themes.

This movement of writers and artists embraced self-indulgence, often disregarding nature, and cultivated an attitude that could be anti-virtue, anti-civilization, and sometimes focused on the macabre. Figures such as Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Joris-Karl Huysmans were influential to the Decadent sensibility. Huysmans' 1884 novel Against Nature, which explored a protagonist retreating into a self-created inner world, became a significant work for the movement. The literary center of Decadence was The Yellow Book, a quarterly journal published between 1894 and 1897, which, with its deliberate association with the transgressive, caused considerable controversy.

The movement also saw an embrace of drugs such as hashish, opium, and absinthe. Visual artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Aubrey Beardsley, and Gustave Moreau explored themes of the spiritual, the morbid, and the erotic within a Decadent mode. The movement's themes and artistic approaches are seen as a significant influence on later subcultures, including the Goth subculture.^[2]