ABSTRACT
The Hungarian Max Nordau (1849-1923), the last of the great degeneration theorists, was a famous critic of fin-de-siècle art and what he saw as debased tendencies in contemporary cultural life. Morel’s definition of degeneration as “a morbid deviation from an original type” provided Nordau with a tool to condemn what he saw as the decadence of late nineteenth-century art and fashion. Moreover, Lombroso’s extension of the concept of degeneration into the realms of “psychiatry, criminal law, politics, and sociology,” as Nordau explains in his dedication, inspired him to apply the concept of degeneration to “the domain of art and literature.”
