The Decadent Movement …… today on the wireless

Now this is one that I will listen to later.

It comes from the In Our Time series on Radio 4 and focuses on the Decadent Movement.

And the reason why I shall listen later is that after it is broadcast, it becomes available again to listen to with a bonus ten minutes where the contributors get to add something they missed out.  Perfect

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. 

Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. 

After burning brightly, the movement was soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.

With Neil Sammells, Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University, Kate Hext, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter, and Alex Murray, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast

Producer: Simon Tillotson".

Pictures; The cover of the Yellow Book periodical 1894, from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894, courtesy of the BBC, and from The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Book 

* The Decadent Movement, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011lrn