Preface

Despite its many famous female and queer icons, Decadence is still perceived as a male domain of aesthetic production. The narrowness of this perception does not do justice to the large proportion of female Decadent writers and artists who, often subversively, collapsed strict gender binaries. In 1979, Linda Dowling asserted that the New Woman and Decadence were ‘twin avatars of the “New”’. Following Dowling, Sally Ledger observed in 2007 that ‘the discursive and aesthetic resonance between aestheticism, the Decadence and the New Woman writing is indisputable. For the cultural movement that embraced aestheticism and Decadence was broader and more eclectic than is sometimes allowed.’ Ledger also agreed with Laurel Brake ‘that “Impressionism, feminism, naturalism, dandyism, symbolism, and classicism all participate in the politics of decadence in the nineties” and with Linda K. Hughes’ account of aestheticism’s ability to combine “everything from impressionist nature poems to perverse sexualities”.’ Ledger’s comments frame the purpose of this issue of Volupté, which seeks to re-establish the creative importance of female Decadent authorship by emphasizing its international scope