Decadence, Degeneration, and Decline: The Popular British Novel

The British Empire controlled roughly a quarter of the world by the end of the nineteenth century; its literature, however, was increasingly haunted by decline.

This course explores why, by way of some of the writers and texts most responsible for shaping what it means to be British in our pop-cultural consciousness.

Focusing on three kinds of breakdown—aesthetic decadence, aristocratic degeneration, and imperial decline—our course links popular texts like Dracula (1897), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) to the emergence of a new kind of British power based on myth and nostalgia.

We also think about decline as a shaper of modernism, the political power of decline, and the cultural afterlives of the texts we encounter.