Literature Glossary

Decadent Movement

Definition:

If you've ever been saddled with an uninvited nickname—you know, like Baron Von Stinkbutt—then you know that sometimes the best thing to do is just roll with it.

And that's just what the Decadents did. They were a group of late-19th-century writers and poets who told industrialized society to talk to the hand and instead focused on promoting sensuality. Moral messages? Fuhgeddaboutit. The Decadent movement was all about self-indulgence, drugs, and being totally emo (minus the Chuck Taylors and Dashboard Confessional records).

If you were an aspiring Decadent writer back in the day, your goal was to get published in The Yellow Book, a literary journal that was published from 1894 to 1897. (You know, when you weren't busy smoking opium and throwing back absinthe.) The Yellow Book is noteworthy not only because it was central to the movement, but also because it made the then-radical move of publishing women writers.

Back to that name, though. Originally, the "decadence" tag was intended as an insult to Romantic writers like noted hunchback enthusiast Victor Hugo. But some later Romantic writers who got lumped into the Decadent movement, like Charles Baudelaire, wore the term like a badge of extravagant honor.

Whether they dug the Decadent label or not, writers like Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, and H.G. Wells were all major players in the movement, which had a lot of overlap with Symbolism and the Aesthetic Movement.