CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Volume 10, Issue 1 (Summer 2027)
Decadence and the Enviroment
Peter Greenaway, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985)
This special issue on ‘Decadence and the Environment’, scheduled for publication in Summer 2027, will engage with the complicated intimacies of decadence and the nonhuman elements of the organic world. Rather than the common characteristic of decadence as a cultural movement invested in the dandy persona, distorted and artificial aesthetics, and passions beyond hetero-procreative monogamy, the essays, creative works, and visual art in this special issue of Volupté will focus on extending the boundaries of eco-decadence. Both scholarly and creative contributions might, to offer a few examples:
engage with the renderings of ornamental animals, pungent rot, ripe sexuality, and sensual landscapes found in works by individuals such as Jean Moréas, Rachilde, F. Holland Day, and Peter Greenaway,
assess the anti-mainstream politics and queer heroes of decadence through a biocentric lens,
situate more recent genres such as environmentalist cli fi, the new weird, and post-apocalyptic literature within or in relation to the contrarian attitudes of works of the decadent movement,
use decadence’s renderings of self-commodification to address practices such as carbon offsets, designating parklands, and defending old-growth forests as acts of self-assuagement, or
address ways in which decadent art and literature might reduce the anthropocentrism of subjectivity itself.
These options are no more than suggestions. Other topics are strongly encouraged. As a whole, this special issue will cover a broad time period and works from various countries and/or cultures.
Please send 250-word proposals to the guest editor Dennis Denisoff at dennis1denisoff@gmail.com by 30 September 2026. The deadline for final submission (essays and creative writing of no more than 7000 words) will be 1 March 2027.
