Decadence is the offshoot of the Aesthetic Movement of the later nineteenth century. The central view of the Decadence movement was – art is totally opposed to ‘nature’, both in the sense of biological nature and of the standard, or natural norms of morality and sexual behaviour. Decadent writers thus found to have cultivated high artifice, and often the bizarre, in their subject matter and style, recoiled from the fecundity and exuberance of instinctual and organic life, preferred elaborate dress over the living form and cosmetics over the natural hue, and often set out to violate what was “natural” in human experience by resorting to drugs, depravity, or sexual deviation in the attempt to achieve “the systematic derangement of the senses” as was echoed by the poet Rimbaud. __History__ This term was derived from the literature and art of the latter ((Roman Empire)) and of Greece in the Byzantine era having the subtle savors and beauties of a culture and art which passed their vigorous prime and fallen into decay. European civilization in the later nineteenth century had also been viewed by many as “fallen into decay”, and thus the movement started was called the Decadence. Gautier summarized the precepts of the Decadence in the “Notice” which he had prefixed to an edition of Baudelaire’s poems, ‘’Les Fleurs du Mal’’ in 1868. The movement reached its height in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. An extreme product of this movement was a novel of 1984, A Regours (Against the Grain) penned by J K Huysmans. The last decades of this movement is also know as the fin de siecle (end of the century) which connotes the lassitude, satiety, and ennui. Major writers of this movement were Oscar Wild, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson. Major artist of this movement was Aubrey Beardsley. Many of the writers and artists of the Decadence experimented with drugs and illicit or perverse amours and several of them died young. The major products of this period included the poems of Ernest Dowson and the Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and his play Salome (1893). The autonomy (self-sufficiency) of art, art (poem or other writings included) as a constructed object with distrust of “spontaneous “nature” etc influenced many writers like W B Yeats, T E Hulme, T S Eliot and the theories of New Critics. The decadent tendencies in literature on drugged perception, sterile or deviant sexuality, and the deliberate inversion of conventional moral and social values, have recently appeared with their modern variations in many writings, especially in Beat poets and novelists. These are prominent in the work of the French writer Jean Genet.