ABSTRACT
The concepts of sentimentality, shallowness and decadence are apparently univocal when they feature in judgements of value, whether those judgements are applied to works of art, to forms of character or to actions. In its narrowest sense 'decadence' has been used as a label for two fairly circumscribed movements in literary history – one of the more important of the strands of experimentation taking place in France during the 1880s and in England during the 1890s. There are two principal ways in which this broadly historical conception of decadence has been used within criticism – the external and the internal. Decadence often seems to appear when the rules start to break down. Returning to the main thread, the suggestion is that the notion of decadence in aesthetic criticism should be understood in terms of breakdowns at the level of expressive form best described in the quasi-literal moral way.
