In this introduction to Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, the editors, Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney, situate the contents of the collection in relationship to the larger objectives of the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series, which aims to move beyond existing preconceptions of individual decades within the nineteenth century by producing new characterizations enabled by recent critical methodologies. This volume highlights in particular the role that work attending to the transnational, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and new approaches to gender and sexuality might play in reshaping our understanding of a period often referred to as “the Naughty Nineties.” This work, the editors argue, enhances our understanding of the nineteenth century’s closing years in their full complexity, dynamism, and intellectual ferment and makes a case for the relevance of perspectives from the 1890s regarding issues that still preoccupy us today.

The introduction considers the appeal Decadence and the work of Oscar Wilde held for queer, cosmopolitan subjects in the early-twentieth century who wished to reimagine structures of kinship. Decadence’s association with sexual dissidence and curiosity along with Wilde’s reputation as a sexual martyr informed the thinking of authors and artists in the twentieth century who worked to generate alternatives to heteronormative practices of affiliation. These figures operated alongside but saw themselves as distinct from high modernist networks, turning to the fin de siècle past to express their sense of distinction from the aesthetic modes in fashion at the time. While Wilde’s capacity for reimagining new modes of kinship informed more liberatory strains of twentieth-century Decadence, his interest in age-differentiated eroticism and the more general tendency to Orientalism within the Decadent Movement also inflected the practices marked by his influence during this period. The introduction thus stresses that the kinship experiments of twentieth-century Decadents carried forward the many political valences of their source material and that their work should be approached through the framework of what Kadji Amin has called “deidealization,” a mode of queer historical practice that acknowledges that queer alternatives are not always just alternatives.

Chapter Five turns to the Harlem Renaissance author and illustrator Richard Bruce Nugent, arguing that his “Geisha Man,” which centers on the erotic relationship between a white American father and his mixed-race child, should be understood as emerging from his sustained engagement with Decadence and the Salome story. I position this work within the framework of Nugent’s extensive experimentation with Decadence to argue that the text’s Orientalism and its preoccupation with incest should be understood as more than a simple echoing of Decadence’s more troubling tendencies. This content operates within the text in service to Nugent’s efforts to conceptualize mixed-race identity and the rupturing of Black kinship structures within the United States. Salome is for Nugent a story about a fetishized performer attempting to enact erotic agency within a system of fractured familial formations, and revising her story allows Nugent to theorize kinship and multiraciality in relationship to what Hortense Spillers refers to as the “losses” and “confusions” that accompanied the “dispersal of the historic African American domestic unit.” This chapter sheds light on the manner in which Orientalist Decadence was transported across the Atlantic to perform different types of service for Black thinkers in Harlem in the early-twentieth century.

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Chapter Six considers the modernist sculptor Eric Gill’s highly unconventional family life, his interest in Indian art, and his connections with Decadent queer Catholicism in relationship to his preoccupation with the family as a site of divine eroticism. While Gill is often thought of as a “distinctly heterosexual” figure with a highly provincial vision, during the 1910s he affiliated himself with a authors and artists, including Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), whose nonnormative sexual identities were intertwined with their Catholic religious identity, and he exhibited a thirst for information about global artistic practices, writing frequently to the Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and engaging extensively with Indian art. He found in Bradley and Cooper, who converted to Catholicism and wrote religious verse concerning their union, a model for conceiving of incestuous desire in divine terms. In his correspondence with Coomaraswamy concerning the treatment of eroticism in Hindu temple sculpture, he found models for the successful integration of faith and sensuality. This network of influences resulted in one of his most well-known works, They (or Ecstasy, 1910-11), an attempt to hallow incestuous desire and transform an extreme form of sexual dissidence into an expression of divine love.