Of Tutus and Tortures: Thoughts on the Decadent and the Weird

Though the lines connecting Decadent and Weird fiction are many, resembling something of a tangled web whose only certain common ancestor is the Gothic novel, one of the primary concerns of both these traditions within fiction is a preoccupation with limits — the limits of bodily experience, the limits of the world’s possibilities, the limits of the physically possible. […]