Decadence, Degeneration, and the End

1. Introduction
Christopher Nissen, Marja Härmänmaa

Part I. The Twilight World

2. Thermal Degeneration: Thermodynamics and the Heat-Death of the Universe in Victorian Science, Philosophy, and Culture
Mason Tattersall

3. A Regenerative Decadence or a Decadent Regeneration: Challenges to Darwinian Determinism by French, Spanish, and Latin American Writers in the Fin de Siècle
Natalia Santamaría Laorden

4. Late Antiquity as an Expression of Decadence in the Poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy and Stefan George
Anastasia Antonopoulou

5. Decadence and Regeneration: Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales as a Tool for Social Change
Magali Fleurot

Part II. The Seduction of Sickness

6. Decadent Tropologies of Sickness
Pirjo Lyytikäinen

7. Consuming and Consumed: Woman as Habituée in Eugène Grasset’s Morphinomaniac

Abigail Susik

8. Decadence, Melancholia, and the Making of Modernism in the Salome Fairy Tales of Strindberg, Wilde, and Ibsen
Kyle Mox

Part III. Decadence and the Feminine

9. Mariia Iakunchikova and the Roots of Decadence in Late-Nineteenth-Century Russian Modernism
Kristen M. Harkness

10. The Spectral Salome: Salomania and Fin-de-Siècle Sexology and Racial Theory
Johannes Hendrikus Burgers

11. “For the Strong-Minded Alone”: Evolution, Female Atavism, and Degeneration in Aubrey Beardsley’s Salomé
Gülru Çakmak

Part IV. Two Studies of Death

12. Death at Sea: Symbolism and Charles Cottet’s Subjective Realism
Maura Coughlin

13. The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death
Marja Härmänmaa

Keywords: History, European History, Literature, general, Twentieth-Century Literature, Cultural History, European Literature, Social History