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Against Nature: A Rebours (Oxford World's Classics)
 
 
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Against Nature: A Rebours (Oxford World's Classics) [Paperback]

Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author), Nicholas White (Editor), Margaret Mauldon (Translator)
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Book Description

August 3, 2009 Oxford World's Classics
Resisting the traditional model of nineteenth-century fiction, Joris-Karl Huysman produced in 1884 a novel unlike any other of his time. Against Nature is the story of Des Esseintes, an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life. As Des Esseintes hides away in his museum of high taste, Huysman offers the reader a treasury of cultural delights and anticipates many aspects of twentieth century modernism. Supplemented by notes and a critical introduction, this new translation is sure to engage today's reader.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nicholas White is Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reissue edition (August 3, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0199555117
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199555116
  • Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #62,809 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars À Rebours: Un Ménagerie de la Décadence...., April 11, 2011
By 
Sébastien Melmoth (Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Against Nature: A Rebours (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
À Rebours: Un Ménagerie de la Décadence...
*
`[A] yellow book. . . . It was the strangest book he had ever read. It was a novel without a plot . . . a psychological study . . . [written] in that curious jewelled style . . . of the French school of Décadents. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as evil in colour. It was a poisonous book'--O. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

Virtually inaugurating the Fin de Siècle, native Parisian J.-K. Huysmans published his masterpiece of the Decadence, À Rebours (literally, `Backwards'), in 1884.

Huysmans's ethos was deeply imbued with the effluvia of Poe, Baudelaire, and Gautier; of course his contemporaries were Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, Balzac, les frères Goncourts, and Zola--(to cite the greater names).

Huysmans was betimes a critic of art and society, a novelist of the Naturalist and Decadent schools, and ultimately a fervent mystic of the Ralliement--the resurgence of Romish occultism, superstition and obscurantism fomented by Vatican I of 1870.

This trajectory of Huysmans's aesthetic evolution is chronologically obvious in his chief publications:
1874 - A Dish of Spices
1876 - Marthe: the Story of a Woman
1879 - The Vatard Sisters
1880 - Backpack
1880 - Parisian Sketches
1881 - Together
1882 - Downstream
1883 - Modern Art
1884 - Backwards
1887 - Stranded
1887 - A Dilemma
1889 - Some People
1891 - The Fallen
1895 - On the Way
1898 - The Cathedral
1901 - Saint Lydwine of Schiedam
1903 - The Oblate

Of course English translations can only approximate Huysmans's opulent vocabulary, exquisitely tortured French syntax, caustic satirical critique, and extraordinarily perceptive descriptive abilities.

À Rebours's narrative is extremely static, claustrophobic and ferocious à la Sade, although black humour and fumisterie are on tap as well (cf. the hilarious episode in Chapter IV of the visit to the dentist): in this, together with dream sequences, Huysmans adumbrates Surrealism.

Basically À Rebours serves as a vehicle to list and annotate every fecund flavour, odour, colour, shape, texture, tone, form, and idea offered by every recherché author and artist that Huysmans's shrewd and extensive observation had ever encountered: a phenomenal text indeed.
*
The Fallen
Downstream
Marthe: the Story of a Woman
On the Way
The Oblate
Parisian Sketches
The Cathedral
Stranded
St Lydwine of Schiedam
The Decadent Reader: Fiction from Fin-de-Siècle France
*
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