Decadent crossings

Building on this scholarship, this special issue of Symbiosis includes new essays by leading scholars that re-evaluate Decadence as a transatlantic phenomenon; question the traditional polarisation of Europe and the Americas by focusing on transatlantic cultural connections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; and enrich prevailing understandings of the literary and artistic works produced in this transitional period between late Romanticism and high Modernism. While prior scholarship has concentrated on Decadence’s influence on American writers, particularly expatriates working in Europe such as H.D. and Henry James, this special issue concentrates on Decadence in fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century American literature and on American writers’ utilisation of decadent motifs and ideas. It unsettles predominant conceptions of American culture in this period, complicates existing definitions and notions of Decadence, and makes a case for the expansion of the canon of decadent writers and texts. What all of these essays have in common is a critical engagement with the movement of decadent ideas back and forth across the Atlantic and the way in which these transatlantic crossings expose Decadence to new kinds of readings, shedding a different light on current debates concerning American literary history.