Decadence Revisited

Mateiu Caragiale and Oscar Wilde represent the extremes of Decadence, both starting from the French model and instilling their own specific features. The legacy of Caragiale is that of the Eastern variant of the dandy, with a strong Balkanic, oriental influence, while Wilde represents the Western one, a mixture of Irish and English cultures. As two important texts of "world literature", »Craii de Curtea-Veche« and »The Picture of Dorian Gray«, prove their value not only through the adherence to Decadence as a literary and cultural paradigm of the fin de siècle, but also through their particularities, through the specificity they bring, arising from two different cultural spaces. Negativity, decay, ruin, mixed with aestheticism, artificiality and sophistication are the two main lines that dissolve in the aesthetics of the two Decadence novels, rooted in Romanticism and announcing Modernism.