Dr Alex Murray is a Senior Lecturer in English at Queens University, Belfast

This paper offers an overview of the relationship between Decadence and the city of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul. It begins by mapping the importance of Byzantium as an alternative model for aesthetic practice in the Victorian period (in opposition to Ancient Greece and Rome), before examining how Théophile Gautier established a particular mournful and orientalising model for writing about the city. That mode will then be traced through Arthur Symons, M.P. Shiel, James Elroy Flecker, and Vita Sackville West, demonstrating that these writers all demonstrate a hostility towards the city. This dislike of Constantinople, it is argued, is based on the absence of modernisation in the city, whereby its physical decay cannot take on a piquancy through contrast, a central feature of the Decadent aesthetic. It is only, the paper concludes, in the way that Decadent motifs were taken up in post-war Turkish literature that we can see an Istanbul Decadence. The paper looks in particular at how Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Huzur (1949) and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) and A Strangeness in My Mind (2014) draw on Decadence to explore the dramatic changes to the city following Kemal Atatürk’s modernisation.

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