Degeneration and Decadence in the Dragon’s Court:
How Fin-de-Siécle Paris’ Gay Cruising Scene gave The King in Yellow’s Play its Cognitively Poisonous Power.
At the Armitage Symposium during NecronomiCon Providence 2026, I presented on decadent art, the pseudoscientific theory of hereditary degeneration, and their relation to Robert W. Chambers’ seminal work of cosmic horror, The King in Yellow.
There is a lot that didn’t make it into this presentation (I only had fifteen minutes!) and I plan to rewrite it as an article, which will include everything I had to cut for time. In the meantime, I’m happy to answer any questions anyone has about it. :)
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Bauer, Heike. “Theorizing Female Inversion: Sexology, Discipline, and Gender at the Fin de Siècle.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 18, no. 1, 2009, pp. 84–102, JSTOR
Chambers, Robert W. The King in Yellow: Annotated Edition. 1895. Annotated by Kenneth Hite, Arc Dream Publishing, 2019.
Chauncey, George. “From Sexual Inversion To Homosexuality: Medicine And The Changing Conceptualization Of Female Deviance.” Salmagundi, no. 58/59, 1982, pp. 114–46, JSTOR
Choquette, Leslie. “Homosexuals in the City: Representations of Lesbian and Gay Space in Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Homosexuality in French History and Culture, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, Harrington Park Press, 2001.
Ellis, Havelock and Symonds, Addington John. Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition. 1897. Edited by Ivan Crozier, Pallgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Erber, Nancy and Peniston, William A., editors and translators. Queer Lives: Men’s Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century France. University of Nebraska, 2007.
Ferrara, Emily. “Westphal Advocates Medical Treatment for Sexual Inversion.” EBSCOhost, 2022. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/westphal-advocates-medical-treatment-sexual
Gautier, Théophile. Mademoiselle de Maupin. 1835. Translated by A.S. Kline, Poetry in Translation Ltd, 2025. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/GautierMademoiselledeMaupinhome.php
Hussey, Andrew. Paris: The Secret History. Bloomsbury USA, 2006.
Joad, Cyril E. M. Decadence: A Philosophical Inquiry. Faber and Faber Limited, 1948
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis. Translated from the German seventh edition by Charles Gilbert Chaddock, the F. A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, 1894. Forgotten Books, 2012.
Kushner, Howard I. “Suicide, Gender, and the Fear of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Medical and Social Thought.” Journal of Social History vol. 26, no. 3, 1993, pp. 461–90, JSTOR
Liégeois, Axel. “Hidden philosophy and theology in Morel’s theory of degeneration and nosology.” History of Psychiatry,vol. 2, 1991, pp. 419-427.
Lovecraft, H. P. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.” Amateur Correspondent, vol. 2, no. 1, May-June 1937, pp. 7-10. The H. P. Lovecraft Archive. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/nwwf.aspx
Lovecraft, H. P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The Recluse, vol. 1, no. 1, 1927, pp. 23-59. The H. P. Lovecraft Archive. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx
Lovett-Graff, Bennett. “Robert W. Chambers.” Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers, edited by Kent P. Ljungquist, Gale, 1999. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 202. Gale Literature Resource Center. https://www.academia.edu/42300481/Robert_W_Chambers
Mazzarello, Paolo. “Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration.” Functional Neurology vol. 26, no. 2, 3 July 2011, pp. 97-101. National Center for Biotechnology Information,https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3814446/
Merrick, Jeffrey. “Chaussons in the Streets: Sodomy in Seventeenth-Century Paris.” Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 15, no. 2, 2006, pp. 167-202, JSTOR
Merrick, Jeffrey. “The Paris Cruising Scene in 1750.” The Gay & Lesbian Review, July-Aug. 2019, https://glreview.org/article/the-paris-cruising-scene-in-1750/
Merrick, Jeffrey and Ragan, Bryant T., editors. Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Translated from the German second edition, 5th ed., D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1895.
Rosiou, Eleni et al. “Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809-1873): The Originator of the Degenerative Theory of the Heredity of Mental Disorders and the Pioneer of the Biological Approach to Psychiatry.” Cureus, vol. 16, no. 9, 16 Sept. 2024. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.69523
Ross, Andrew Israel. Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Temple University Press, 2019.
Sibalis, Michael. “Homosexuality in Early Modern France.” Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World, edited by Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Sibalis, Michael D. “Paris.” Queer Sites: Gay urban histories since 1600, edited by David Higgs, Routledge, 1999.
Sibalis, Michael. “The Palais-Royal and the Homosexual Subculture of Nineteenth-Century Paris.” Homosexuality in French History and Culture, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, Harrington Park Press, 2001.
Söder, Hans-Peter. “Disease and Health as Contexts of Modernity: Max Nordau as a Critic of Fin-de-Siècle Modernism.” German Studies Review vol. 14, no. 3, 1991, pp. 473–87, JSTOR
Ujvári, Hedvig. “Degeneration and Its Discontents: Rereading Nordau in Context.” Histories vol. 6, no. 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.3390/histories6020027
Weir, David. Decadence: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Introductions, 2018.
Wilson, Michael L. “Drames d’amour des pédérastes: Male Same-Sex Sexuality in Belle Epoque Print Culture.” Homosexuality in French History and Culture, edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, Harrington Park Press, 2001.