While the Japanese and American fleets were fighting in the seas surrounding the Philippine Islands, MacArthur’s forces were expanding the beachhead and seizing the high ground leading to Leyte Valley. The campaign on Leyte would last for two and a half rain-soaked months and mop up operations several months longer. Japanese Imperial General Headquarters decided to put forth a determined effort to defend Leyte, realizing that an American victory there would inevitably lead to the projection of American power onto Luzon and the ultimate fall of the Philippines. American submarines and aircraft based in the Philippines would sever the Japanese lines of communication to the Dutch East Indies – and thus drain the lifeblood of raw materials upon which the Japanese war economy depended. But by pouring reinforcements into Leyte, the Japanese high command made the defense of Luzon impossible. The troops fighting through the swamps and over the tortuous mountains of Leyte did not know it, but they were fighting in the decisive battle of the Philippines campaign.

US forces invaded Mindoro on December 15, 1944, to establish airfields that could support an invasion of Luzon. On January 9, 1945, Sixth Army invaded Luzon at Lingayen Gulf. Once ashore, US forces gained access to the northern end of the central plain, an optimal avenue of approach leading to Manila, with its vital docks area that could support US forces on Luzon and serve as a base for the invasion of Japan. The invasion was unopposed, as Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita had withdrawn his forces to fight in the mountainous interior of the island. Subsequent landings near Bataan and south of Manila augmented Sixth Army’s drive to Manila. By February 5, MacArthur’s forces had conducted three amphibious landings on Luzon, created a massive logistical base at Lingayen Gulf, built or rehabilitated numerous airfields, and advanced to Manila in dramatic fashion, liberating hundreds of thousands of Filipinos and American detainees along the way. The 1st Cavalry and 37th Infantry Divisions had penned in Japanese forces in the heart of Manila south of the Pasig River, while the 11th Airborne Division was closing in from the south.

Notions of decadence, decline, and decay are intrinsically linked to the history of art. The discipline’s three recognized forefathers ? Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin ? all relied on the concept of decadence (and its antonym, progress) to make sense of the history of the visual arts and to evaluate the art of their times. A developmental model of art was central to the interpretative schemes of these art historians. In this organicist model, earlier developments prepare the stage for what comes later; and after a particular style flourishes for a time, its decline is inevitable as newer styles overtake it. Decadent artists such as Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley mock aesthetic standards and moral rules, precluding universal appreciation, and proudly so. Decadent artists and decadent audiences are estranged from their society and feel disdain for those who are scandalized by decadent art’s innovative form and immoral subject matter.

As a self-reflexive conceptual category that works by inverting and unsettling commonly held assumptions, decadence has much in common with the device of parody. In England in the early 1890s the self-conscious self-mockery of decadents, dandies, and New Women writers gestured to a robustness and broadening of the decadent tradition. Those New Women writers who used the unorthodoxies of decadence to align themselves against a conservative press did so chiefly via the early volumes of the decadent periodical The Yellow Book between 1894 and 1895. Paradoxically, through the exaggerated appropriation of features of male decadent writing ? egoism, sexual expressiveness, homosexuality ? New Women writers declared their independence from patriarchal literary convention. This chapter discusses the contributions to the Yellow Book of Ella D’Arcy, Ada Leverson, and Victoria Cross, who wrote with a heightened sexual consciousness and a profound sense of disenchantment with contemporary culture in order to raise feminist concerns about sexuality, class, and race.