¹ The term “endism” is taken from Atlas, James, “What is Fukuyama Saying?”, in The New York Times Magazine, 38Google Scholar.

² Of these texts, Sinai's is the one that offers the most severe assessment of contemporary life. See, for example, Sinai, Robert, The Decadence of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman, 1978), 3Google Scholar: “the last third of the twentieth century ushers the world's developed countries, the United States in particular, into a period of growing dislocation and crisis. Symptoms of disturbance, irregularity and deterioration are to be seen in every sphere of existence.”

³ Cf Minc, Alain, Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1993)Google Scholar.

⁴ Cf. Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 18Google Scholar: “the 1980s and 1990s… compulsively tell and retell the stories of the 1880s and 1890s.”

⁵ Ibid., 188: “Syphilis and AIDS have both occupied similar positions at the ends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as diseases that seem to be the result of sexual transgression and have generated moral panic.”

⁶ Ibid., 1: “From urban homelessness to imperial decline… the last decades of the twentieth century seem to be repeating the problems, themes and metaphors of the fin de siècle.”

⁷ Cf. Mestrovic, Stjepan, The Coming Fin de Siècle: An Application of Durkheim's Sociology to Modernity and Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1991), 2Google Scholar.

⁸ Cf. Ledger, Sally and McCracken, Scott, “Introduction”, in Ledger, Sally and McCracken, Scott (eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Beer, Gillian, “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past”, in Belsey, Catherine and Moore, Jane (eds.), The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1989), 63Google Scholar.

⁹ Cf. Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. Lipman, Samuel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 47–48Google Scholar: “Plenty of people will try to give the masses… an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses … but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgements and watchwords.”

¹⁰ This connection between Juvenal and Veblen is made in Brantlinger, Patrick, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 30Google Scholar.

¹¹ Cf. Decimus Junius Juvenal, “Satire X” (c. 125), in Juvenal, Decimus Junius, Sixteen Satires upon the Ancient Harlot, ed. and trans. Robinson, Stephen (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1983), 158–59Google Scholar: “ … for they who once/Gave commands, fasces, legions everything, now use/Restraint and only for two things wish anxiously: /Bread and the circuses.”

¹² Cf. Thorstein Veblen, “Editorial from The Dial”, 14 June 1919, in Veblen, Thorstein, Essays on Our Changing Order, ed. Ardzrooni, Leon (New York: Viking, 1934), 450Google Scholar.

¹³ Cf. Stokes, John, “ Introduction”, in Stokes, John (ed.), Fin de Siècle/Fin de Globe: Fears and Fantasies of the Late Nineteenth Century (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1992), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “Fin-de-siècle myths can be particularly compelling (both inhibiting and compelling), because they feed on data in order to confirm fears.”

¹⁴ This type of writing is defined as “blank generation fiction” in Young, Elizabeth and Caveney, Graham, Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction (London: Serpent's Tail, 1992)Google Scholar. Coupland, Douglas, Generation X (London: Abacus, 1992)Google Scholar, offers another central reference point for narratives of this kind.

¹⁵ An alternative label for blank fiction is offered by Siegle, Robert, Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. The categorisations “yuppie fiction,” “hyper-realism” and “new narrative” are discussed in Young, Elizabeth and Caveney, Graham, Shopping in Space, v–viGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Millennial readings of blank fiction can be found in many places. See, for example, Young, Elizabeth, “And a Good Fang Too,” in The Independent on Sunday, 13 03 1994, 31Google Scholar: “Both Lost Souls and Brite's early stories are replete with fin de siècle imagery.” In Tyrnauer, Matthew, “Who's Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?”, in Vanity Fair (08 1994), 73Google Scholar, a comparison is drawn between The Informers and Less Than Zero and the suggestion made that in the later novel “ the sense of anomie is heightened even further; the clock seems to be winding down: vampires cruise the streets of Encino in Porsches and schlepp over to Beverly Hills for dinner at the Ivy.” Clark, Roger, in “ Scalpel on the Soul”, in The Observer, 27 03 1994, 17Google Scholar, a review of Dennis Cooper's Closer and Wrong, writes: “never was spiritual decay more lovingly dissected.”

¹⁷ Koja, Kathe, Skin (London: Millennium, 1993)Google Scholar; Brite, Poppy Z., Lost Souls (London: Penguin, 1994)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Accounts of the relationship between nineteenth century fiction, the fin de Siècle and the figure of the vampire can be found in Senf, Carol, The Vampire in Nineteenth Century English Literature (Bowling Green State: Popular Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Craft, Christopher, “‘Kiss Me With Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” in Showalter, Elaine (ed.), Speaking of Gender (New York: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar. The relationship between Vampirism and contamination has been traced in Showalter, Eliane, Sexual Anarchy, 179–84Google Scholar, Twitchell, James, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press 1981)Google Scholar, and Varma, Devendra, “The Genesis of Dracula: A Re-Visit”, in Carter, Margaret (ed.), Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Cf. Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature (1884), trans. Baldick, Robert (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1966), 22Google Scholar: “A Desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.”

²⁰ Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature (1873), ed. Philips, Adam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 152Google Scholar.

²¹ Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (London: Macmillan, 1995), 55–56Google Scholar. This argument is based on a reading of a section from Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)Google Scholar, in Wilde, Oscar, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, ed. Murray, Isobel (London: Dent, 1975), 173Google Scholar: “The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.”

²² Spivak, Gayatri, “Decadent Style”, in Language and Style (1974), 7, 229Google Scholar.

²³ The suggestion is made in Thornton, R. K. R., The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 187Google Scholar, that decadent literature is “an expression of …disintegration and failure in elegant cadences; of a fleeing into an artificial world or an ideal world to escape from the consciousness of that disintegration.”

²⁴ The factors considered here and their influence on decadence have been discussed in a number of other places. See, for example, Showalter, Elaine, Sexual AnarchyGoogle Scholar and Ledger, Sally “The New Woman and the Crisis of Victorianism ” in Ledger, Sally and McCracken, Scott (eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin de SiècleGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the significance of changing gender roles. See Laura Chrisman, “Empire, ‘Race’, and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle: The Work of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner,” Alexandra Warwick, “Vampires and The Empire: Fears and the Fictions of the 1890s,” and Williams, Carolyn “ Utopia Limited: Nationalism, Empire and Parody in the Comic Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,” all in Ledger, Sally and McCracken, Scott (eds.), Cultural Politics at the Fin de SiècleGoogle Scholar, for a discussion of the relationship between decadence and the shifts in Imperial power. Analysis of the effects changes in economic relations had on decadence can be found in Alice Teichova, “A Legacy of Fin de Siècle Capitalism: The Giant Corporation,” and Chandler, Alfred D., “Fin de Siècle: Industrial Transformation,” both in Teich, Mikulas and Porter, Roy (eds.), Fin de Siècle and its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. See also Teich's introduction to the same volume.

²⁵ Cf. Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 54Google Scholar: “The pursuit of artifice is complicit with a violent rejection of sociality.”

²⁶ Cf. Hobsbawm, Eric, Industry and Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 176–77Google Scholar: “By 1900 … the foundations of the modern large-scale industry had been laid … The last major change was the increase in the scale of economic enterprise, the concentration of production and ownership, the rise of an economy composed of a handful of great lumps of rock — trusts, monopolies, oligopolies — rather than a large number of pebbles.”

²⁷ Cf. Benjamin, WalterCharles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High-Capitalism, trans. Zohn, Harry (London: New Left Books, 1973), 170Google Scholar: “With Baudelaire, Paris for the first time became the subject of lyrical poetry. This poetry is no local folklore; the allegorist's gaze, which falls upon the city is rather the gaze of alienated man. It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of living still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city.”

²⁸ Cf. ibid., 105: “In L'art pour Part, the poet for the first time faces language the way the buyer faces the commodity on the open market.” See also, Eagleton, Terry, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: NLB, 1981), 25Google Scholar: “Strolling through the city, loitering without intent, languid yet secretly vigilant, he displays in living motion something of the commodity's self-contradictory form.”

²⁹ Cf. Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 136Google Scholar: “Despite his desperate attempts to exclude the values of the marketplace from Fonterey, they remain potent, acting like invisible magnetic poles casting a field of force over his life, relentlessly pulling and distorting all his feelings and choices.”

³⁰ Cf. Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, 63Google Scholar: “The decadent self was nourished by the pride it took in recognising that its own values were false, a cynical superiority of view which was also, however, an acknowledgement of its own powerlessness to make things otherwise.” See also, Brantlinger, Patrick, Bread and Circuses, 115Google Scholar: “ This aesthetic decadence… could be at once Utopian and dystopian, a model of decadent behaviour to be admired and imitated but also an exemplar of imperial hubris and futility – the ironic mirror of the decadents' own bourgeois… society.”

³¹ Cf. Mandel, Ernest, Long Waves of Capitalist Development: The Marxist Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 81Google Scholar: “The postwar expansionist long wave is a real wave, not fictitious…. There was a powerful growth in material production. There was a strong expansion in the world market brought about by an upsurge in the average rate of profit and by a subsequent upsurge in… capital accumulation.” See also, Mandel, , Late Capitalism, trans. de Bres, Joris (London: Verso, 1978), 191Google Scholar: “Late capitalism, far from representing a ‘ post-industrial society’, thus appears as the period in which all branches of the economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could further add the increasing mechanisation of the sphere of circulation …and the increasing mechanisation of the superstructure.”

³² Ellis, Bret Easton, Less Than Zero (London: Picador, 1985), 95–96Google Scholar.

³³ Cf. Mandel, Ernest, Late Capitalism, 398–99Google Scholar: “The extension of capitalist commodity production and circulation in the sphere of consumption under late capitalism.”

³⁴ Coupland, Douglas, Generation X, 129.Google Scholar

³⁵ Cf. Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature, 96Google Scholar: “Des Esseintes had always been excessively fond of flowers.”

³⁶ Lau, Evelyn, “Fresh Girls,” inLau, Evelyn, Fresh Girls (London: Minerva, 1994), 5–6Google Scholar.

³⁷ Cooper, Dennis, Try (London: Serpent's Tail, 1994), 124Google Scholar.