Over the past thirty years, scholarship on the connections between Decadence and modernism has expanded into its own field of inquiry. Despite the publication of cultural studies addressing the international scope of Decadence and theoretical reconsiderations of its aesthetic function, there remains comparatively little work that closely examines the wide-ranging texts of Decadence in relation to these changes. I address this gap by reading the aesthetics of transition in works of Decadence that have been either largely overlooked, like the sensationalist Keynote Series, or writing that need to be reconsidered in the context of a modernist vanguard, such as the poetry of Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. I examine how the productive disruptions of Decadence exhibit an aesthetic commitment to destruction that precedes twentieth-century modernisms obsession with discontinuity. The complex issues that surround Decadencethe slippery aesthetics, the unstable relationship it establishes between cognition, the body, and the manifest artworkrepresents the advent of a century of radical works that challenge discrete notions of being, interacting, perceiving and creating.