Re- Claiming Welsh Decadence: Performing Identity, Nation and Class through fetishised crossings

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My thesis shall offer a new reading of decadence by investigating the relationship that emerged in Wales between material culture and performance identities at the fin de siècle. Its focus on the distinctiveness of Welsh decadence places decadent performance within the patriarchal industrial (South) and aristocratic (North) landscapes of Wales. Rather than treating the decadents as exclusively metropolitan 'performers' as most critical readings of decadence suggest, the thesis will argue that the individuality of the Welsh Dandy and New Woman challenged and altered pre-existing notions of what constituted 'self' and 'selfhood' in Wales. A central element of the performance of identity was the use of material objects that provided Welsh decadents with a means of negotiating and re-negotiating their sense of self and nationhood. To conceptualise Welsh decadence, my thesis shall provide an historicised critical perspective to explore the connections between past and present forms of decadent identification. Using theories and methodologies grounded in the field of neo-Victorian studies but expanding upon them to articulate a specific 'neo-Welsh decadence', my thesis will explore the central question: how does the 21st century cultivate an engagement with and influence from late-Victorian concepts of Welsh decadence? Key to this will be the role of the fetish. As Elaine Showalter suggested in the 1990s, 'fetishistic fantasies proliferate at times of cultural crisis because they are in part a product of and response to narratives of exhaustion and lack.' It is through this mode of inquiry and its place as an unresolved tension in neo-Victorian studies as a form of postmodern critique, that I aim to explore and challenge the ways in which fin de siécle representations of Welsh decadence and performance reacted against the backdrop of patriarchal and industrial capitalism.