Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray", Joris-Karl Huysmans' "Against Nature" (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in "Penguin Classics". A wildly original fin-de-siecle novel, "Against Nature" con[...]
'It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteent[...]
At the end of the 19th century, two important developments, which both effect fin de siecle literature, unsettle the European subject: the loss of historical and metaphysical security on the one hand and a profound crisis of perception on the other. Jan Rohden examines the effects of both developmen[...]