The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. Fun fact: In Real Life, Huysmans was a civil servant and worked for the French Interior Ministry, on whose stationery he wrote his novels. Lastly…the younger generation, that class of frightful louts who feel the need to speak and laugh at the top of their voices in restaurants and cafes, who knock you off the pavement without saying sorry, and who, without even an excuse me, without even noticing you, ram the wheels of their baby carriages against your legs.

In July of 1890, Oscar Wilde published A Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time in Lippincott's Magazine.Perhaps true peace can only be found after knowing so much, yet understanding so little and finally being able to ask the right questions. His novel The Last Hundred Days was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award, and his second novel, Throw me to the Wolves , won the 2020 Encore Award. You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Against Nature displays a profound disgust for women as well as an effete sensibility that rejected `normality' and convention. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.

And so we come to what has often been noted as being the linchpin of Decadence, and the book upon which the Decadent movement of fin de siecle France rests. the universal admiration (Goya’s) works had won had…put him off slightly, and he had refrained from framing them for some years, for fear that by putting them on show, the first idiot who caught sight of them would deem it necessary to relieve himself of his banal opinions and to go into raptures in front of them, in a completely conventional fashion.He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably-coloured bindings and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint. A specific passage in A Rebours in which Huysmans alludes to multiple places homosexual men were known to meet-up through-out Paris is used against Wilde in court; in A Rebours, Huysmans suggests a sexual relationship between the protagonist, Des Esseintes, and a young man he meets asking directions towards Rue de Babylon. As well as engendering a supra-human ideal in his soul…religion had also stirred up the illegitimate ideal of sensual pleasure. Those unfamiliar with the style and ideology may find it difficult to relate to, not least because there is no real plot to speak of. Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world he created himself.