Weird Decadence

Thursday 19 November 2026, 6.00-8.00pm 

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Institute of English Studies

Senate House

Room 264

BADS is delighted to host a jeudi on “Weird Decadence” by DRC Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow, Dr James Machen.

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The histories of decadence and weird fiction are impossible to disentangle. Short story collections of the 1890s – for example, Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894) and The Three Impostors (1895), and Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow (1895) – were both lurid products of decadence and among the most influential works on the later ‘Lovecraft circle’ associated with Weird Tales in America in the 1920s and 30s. The fiction and poetry of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and even Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) are replete with decadence, both thematic and stylistic. This talk will explore this intertwined literary history, arguing that American weird fiction was not so much tangential to fin-de-siècle decadence as a continuation and transformation of it.

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James Machin is a Visiting Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a member of its Decadence Research Centre. He is the author of Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 (Palgrave, 2018) and Technical Editor for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle. His recent editorial work also includes The Strange Stories of John Buchan (British Library Publishing, 2025). He has taught at Birkbeck, University of London, the Royal College of Art, and the University of Bedfordshire.

In solidarity with the continuing strike action at Goldsmiths, this event will take place at Senate House. Attendance is free but please register below!

Location

Senate House is in Bloomsbury, central London.

Senate House
Malet Street
London
WC1E 7HU
United Kingdom

For directions please visit their website.

For more information about this event, please email drc@gold.ac.uk.