Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans Read Free Book Online

Appendix II .
    5 . Marianne Faithfull,
Faithfull
(London: Penguin, 1995), p. 100.
    6 . Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Walt Whitman’ (1878),
Essays and Poems
, ed. Claire Harman (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 138.
    7 . Osip Mandelstam,
The Collected Critical Prose and Letters
, ed. Jane Gary Harris, tr. Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link (London: Harvill, 1991), p. 100.
    8 . Quoted in Robert Baldick,
The Life of J.-K. Huysmans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 27. Baldick’s biography is still a key reference work for modern Huysmans
amateurs
and scholars.
    9 . André Breton,
Anthologie de l’humour noire
,
Oeuvres complètes
, vol. II, ed. Bonnet et al. (Paris: Pléiade, 1992), p. 997.
    10 . Léon Bloy, ‘Les Représailles du Sphinx’,
Le Chat Noir
, 14 June 1884.
    11 . James Joyce, ‘Realism and Idealism in English Literature’,
Occasional, Critical and Political Writings
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 173.
    12 .
The Damned (Là-Bas
), tr. Terry Hale (London: Penguin, 2001).
    13 .
The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans
, tr. and ed. Barbara Beaumont (London: Athlone, 1989), p. 48.
    14 . Ibid., p. 46.
    15 . Ibid., p. 55.
    16 . Ibid., p. 72.
    17 . The following year (1885) saw the publication of a parodic volume,
The Deliquescences
, by one ‘Adoré Floupette’, written by two poets – Vicaire and Beauclair – as a send-up of their ‘Decadent’ contemporaries. As Appendix II of contemporary reviews and responses shows, some of Huysmans’ readers thought of
Against Nature
as at least in part parodic.
    18 . For an account of images and representations of women in this period, see Shearer West,
Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty
(London: Bloomsbury, 1993).
    19 . Ezra Pound, ‘The Approach to Paris’, New Age, 9 October 1913.

Further Reading
EDITIONS OF
AGAINST NATURE
    A Rebours
(Paris: Charpentier, 1884). First edition.
    A Rebours
(Paris: A. Lepère, 1903). Limited edition (130 copies) with ‘Preface written twenty years after the novel’.
    A Rebours
appears in volume VII of the
Oeuvres complètes
of Huysmans (Paris: Crès, 1929; reprinted Geneva: Slatkine, 1972). There are two outstanding modern editions: Marc Fumaroli’s (Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1977), and Rose Fortassier’s (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1981).
ON HUYSMANS
    Baldick, Robert,
The Life of J. K. Huysmans
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955).
    Banks, Brian R.,
The Image of Huysmans
(New York: AMS Press, 1990).
    Beaumont, Barbara, (trans.),
The Road from Decadence: From Brothel to Cloister. Selected Letters of J. K. Huysmans
(London: Athlone, 1989).
    Borie, Jean,
Huysmans: Le Diable, le célibataire et Dieu
(Paris: Grasset, 1991).
    Cogny, Pierre,
J.-K. Huysmans à la recherche de l’unité
(Paris: Nizet, 1953).
    Grojnowski, Daniel,
À Rebours de J.-K. Huysmans
(Paris: Gallimard/Foliothèque, 1996).
    Huneker, James Gibbons, ‘The Pessimist’s Progress’, in
Egoists: A Book of Supermen
(New York: Scribner, 1909).
    Lloyd, Christopher,
J.-K. Huysmans and the ‘Fin-de-siècle’ Novel
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
c
.1990).
BACKGROUND AND CONTEXTS
    Birkett, Jennifer,
The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870–1914
(London: Quartet, 1986).
    Griffiths, Richard,
The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914
(London: Constable, 1966).
    Hustvedt, Asti (ed.),
The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from ‘Fin de Siècle’ France
(New York: Zone Books, 1998).
    McGuinness, Patrick (ed.),
Symbolism, Decadence and the ‘Fin de Siècle’: French and European Perspectives
(Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).
    Pierrot, Jean,
The Decadent Imagination 1880–1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
    Praz, Mario,
The Romantic Agony
(Oxford: Oxford