In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and
material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease
and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth
century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last
fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases,
gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug
use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent
Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-siecle
France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take
pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy,
and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life,
which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant,
Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendes, Rachilde, Jean Moreas,
Octave Mirbeau, Josephin Peladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the
riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of
medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its
positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters:
sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes,
nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely
upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The
Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the
authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in
English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a
compelling portrait of fin-de-siecle France."
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