Parodic and post-classic, British Decadent Aestheticism reapproached
Parodic and post-classic, British Decadent Aestheticism reapproached

Summary/Abstract: Considering the fact that postmodernism may, from a certain viewpoint, be called ‘‘neo- Decadence” and Oscar Wilde a ‘‘pre-postmodernist,” this essay approaches the affinity between Decadence and postmodernism in terms of their shared post-classical and parodist condition. Indicating the insufficiency of the romantic/classicist model, and taking as the point of departure Symons’s description of Decadence as the disfiguring of the ‘‘classic,” it looks at Decadent subversions through Linda Hutcheon’s twofold parodist paradigm. It shows how Decadence, which is doubly parodist – in the stylistic sense (as in Max Beerbohm) and in social sense (as in Wilde) – subverts its classical heritage, thus, anticipating postmodernist strategies.

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