Book excerpt: For all its strong reactions against Romanticism, Decadence shared with the period a mutual distrust of the philosophy of utilitarianism and the aesthetics of neo-Classicism. Decadent Romanticism reflects on the interstices between Romantic and Decadent literature and explores these movements' obsessions with subjectivity, isolation, addiction, fragmentation, representation, romance, and voyeurism, as well as a poetics of desire and anxieties over the purpose of aestheticism.