ABSTRACT
This chapter examines that Decadence and modernization are mutually constituting, global, and subject to ongoing renegotiations that have their own varying rhythms when viewed geographically. It explains the meaning of Decadence in wider literary circulation, and considers global literatures of decadence. Most discussions of Decadence at the fin de Siècle begin with ancient Rome in the fifth century, yet Chinese literati were also formulating deviations that they called decadent as early as the sixth century, the late Tang period. The immediate pre-history of Russian Decadence is in the contradictions of the Hebrew Revival and Slavophilia from the 1860s. The State replaced all Ottoman social, political, and cultural institutions with Western models, including replacing the Arabo-Persian alphabet with Latin phonetic orthography; yet writers often clung to symbolism and nostalgia. The enforced modernization process produced the Arabic Romantics, who reacted to Al-nahdah's positivism with symbolism, transcendentalism, nationalism, and spiritualism.
