With its burgeoning interest in materialism, physiology, and the body, Victorian culture can be seen as anticipating contemporary critical formulations of the affect concept (Cohn; Jaffe). Nineteenth-century writers like Alexander Bain ( The Emotions and the Will , 1859), George Henry Lewes ( Problems of Life and Mind , 1874–79), and Grant Allen ( Physiological Aesthetics , 1877) explored the materiality and the somatics of emotions in ways that resonate with contemporary theorisations of affect. Modern affect theory, in turn, has developed an analytical language and a conceptual toolkit which provide, in Elisha Cohn’s words, a “provocative critical vocabulary and approach for Victorian studies” (564). Commonly defined as a set of pre-linguistic, pre-cognitive, and unconscious physiological intensities capable of moving and connecting bodies, affect has been understood as a force that crosses boundaries between the material and the immaterial as well as the human and the non-huma
The recent decade has seen a surge in the interest of Decadence studies as a distinct field of enquiry uncomfortably perched at the cusp between late Victorianism and Modernism. In 2019, the editors of the Cambridge Critical Series on Decadence and Literature , Jane Desmarais and David Weir, attest to the temporal elasticity of Decadence studies, claiming that the "study of decadence has been extended well into the twentieth century, and some would argue, […] that the concept has contemporary relevance as well" (1). Indeed, as Kate Hext’s and Alex Murray’s Decadence in the Age of Modernism (2019) finds, Decadence has bled into the following literary periods in a way that prompts the question whether it has ever been truly ‘over’. As a consequence, decadent modes of enquiry prove illuminating in topical 21st-century debates. Similarly pointing to the expansive aftermath of Decadence, Regenia Gagnier has alerted us to its global dimensions and the imperial implications of lite