Introduction

Abstract The introduction contends that the long-standing ‘Dowson Legend’, a pseudo-critical agglomeration of myths that present the author as a drunkard, a debauchee, and a latent paedophile, and which was once responsible for his considerable reputation and notoriety, now results in the serious neglect of his writing. Attending, instead, to the aesthetical self-fashioning that Dowson and his contemporaries habitually engage in, which fuses his life and work into a seamless whole, a continuous vie romancée; and to his intertextual, self-similar, and essentially collaborative poesis; we can better grasp the complex reticulations of Dowson’s life and art. His specific logic of late Romantic inspiration, which simulates intimate encounters with female alterity and typically centres on adolescent women—what I term Dowson’s Decadent museology—is both a function and expression of these ceaseless arrangements of life, best understood in relation to the prevailing milieu of experimental aestheticism at the Victorian fin de siècle.