ABSTRACT
In Decadence, the Romantics' tripartite aesthetic of the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime becomes unbalanced, and whilst the beautiful and picturesque remain prominent in Decadent aesthetics, the Romantic sublime as it is associated with nature is obfuscated. The popularization, commercialization, and newspaper sensationalism of Alpine experience in the mid to nineteenth century puts it at odds with the elitist culture of Aestheticism and Decadence. The Decadents' ambivalent engagements with the Romantic sublime should be accounted for in these recoveries, for they illustrate that engagements with Romanticism in Decadent writings were critical and selective. It is motivated by the sense of Romanticism as a dynamic aesthetic philosophy that could be adapted as a means to articulate the experience of the individual confronting modern science and religious Doubt. At the same time, self-conscious rejections of the sublime by Decadent writers speak of an engagement with Romanticism that distances itself from popular appropriations of the landscapes long identified with the Romantic sublime.
