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Beginning with a widespread definition of Decadence as when individual parts flourish at the expense of the whole, Regenia Gagnier - a leading cultural historian of late nineteenth-century Britain - shows the full range of meanings of individualism at the height of its promise.

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Acknowledgements Introduction: Individuals-in-Relation The Ironies of Western Individualism New Women, Female Aesthetes and Socialist Individualists: The Literature of Separateness and Solubility Decadent Interiority and the Will The Unclassed and the Non-Christian Roots of Philanthropy Good Europeans and Neo-Liberal Cosmopolitans: Ethics and Politics in Late Victorian Cosmopolitanism and Beyond Appendix: Interiority, Exteriority, and Mystical Substitution: The Case of J.K. Huysmans Notes Index

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´...knowledgeable and wide-ranging...´ - Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens

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REGENIA GAGNIER has held chairs at Stanford University, USA, and the University of Exeter, UK, where she is currently Professor of English and Director of Exeter Interdisciplinary Institute. She has also taught at Berkeley and Oxford. Her previous books include Idylls of the Marketplace, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain 1832-1920 and The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. She is also Editor in Chief of Literature Compass and Director of its Global Circulation Project and President of the British Association for Victorian Studies.

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