Chapter 2 examines the significance of the association between music and masochism in texts by Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Here music is variously figured as acting upon the body in a manner that resists the imposition of identity and refuses the coherence of the self, while turning instead to modes of self-abandonment and disembodiment. Music in Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ dramatizes a broader oscillation in his works between the denial and embrace of wilfully self-destructive masochistic violence. In ‘Marsyas in Flanders’ (1900), Vernon Lee strategically embraces the figure of Marsyas – an emblem of musical masochism – as a means of resisting the categorization of the queer body by fin-de-siècle sexology. In Symons’s ‘Christian Trevalga’ (1902) music becomes associated with a desire to abandon the materiality of the body and affirm instead a form of subjectivity defined by ‘disembodiment’. Symons’s essays on music and musical performance present the aesthetic autonomy of absolute music in a manner that articulates a form of dispersed subjectivity that can profitably be read in the light of contemporary queer theory.

The introduction to this volume sets out some of the challenges in defining and using the term ‘decadence’ to describe the literature covered by the chapters that follow. It begins by establishing the patterns for conservative dismissals of Decadent literature in responses to the Pre-Raphaelite poets in the 1870s, before turning to the hysteric anti-Decadent critique of Max Nordau. In opposition to these challenges to ‘decadence’ it surveys some of the most important attempts to define a literature of Decadence: Gautier, Bourget, and Arthur Symons. What emerges is an understanding of Decadence as another name not for cultural decline and dissipation, but for aesthetic and cultural revolution. The chapter then examines how Decadent studies has in recent years undergone a series of transformations, encouraging us to interrogate the gendered, temporal, formal, political and geographical frameworks that had governed earlier understandings of Decadence as a literary practice in Britain.

As the long shadow of Tennyson began to retreat in the 1880s, poetry found itself without clear directions for form or content. The temporality of the decade is a kind of anti-teleological anticipation--poets felt that something new needed to happen, but what that advent was remained unspecified. These conditions left a space for ‘minor poetry’, a term that implies not a position on a scale of value but a field of innovation and experimentation. This chapter first surveys the way this shifting ground is captured in anthologies, and discusses how the poetry of the decade resists easy capture in literary history. It then goes on to explore how the temporality of the 1880s is reflected in W. E. Henley’s ‘In Hospital’ sequence of lyric poems.