The Lost Atlantis: configurations of childhood in Decadent writing, 1870–1940

Appropriating Romantic inheritances, it demonstrates how Decadent writing transformed earlier models of childhood into pursuits of aesthetic transcendence characterised by poetics of fragility and futility. Each writer mobilises the child-figure differently. While Machen explores the child as an originating source from which the artist’s recollection of beauty derives, Reid navigates the relationship between childhood memory and aesthetic self-renovation.

Women writers Sharp, Syrett, and Dearmer reconfigure the child’s ‘play’ as a Paterian practice, recuperating these modes as generative forms of self-culture, and White’s gift-book <i>The Parade</i> (1897) contemplates the child’s productive responsivity through the material form of the illustrated book. Collectively, these writers configured childhood as a site of aesthetic resistance against the rationalising forces of modernity and industrialisation, challenging narratives of cultural progress.

Ultimately, this thesis argues that childhood, far from peripheral to Decadence, constitutes a sustained meditation on aesthetic perception, artistic formation, and the possibilities of recovering beauty in an age of perceived decline.<br><br><i>Thesis is embargoed until 31 July 2031.</i><br>