The cult of decadence is usually dismissed as an eccentricity of French literature, a final twitter of Romantic neurosis, convulsing the lunatic fringe of lette

"It was the best oftimes. It was the worst oftimes. " The famous open ing sentence ofCharles Dickens' Tale oJ Two Cities can serve as a motto to characterize th

Honorable Mention for the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association Charles Bernheimer described dec