Decadence and Literature

Jane Desmarais is Professor of English and Director of the Decadence Research Unit in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written numerous essays on the theme of decadence and has co-edited several works, including Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (with Chris Baldick, 2012), Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems (with Chris Baldick, 2017), and Decadence and the Senses (with Alice Condé, 2017). Her monograph, Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers, 1850 to the Present was published in 2018.

David Weir is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, where he taught literature, linguistics, and cinema. He has published books on Jean Vigo, James Joyce, William Blake, orientalism, and anarchism, as well as three books on decadence. Those books have had a major role in the development of decadence as an academic field of study, beginning with Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), Decadent Culture in the United States (2007), and, most recently, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (2018).