Ailing, neurotic, and bored with the world, the nobleman Des Esseintes retreats to a secluded cottage in the French countryside. Determined to shun all contact with other people—demanding that even his live-in domestics must wear face-covering robes in his presence—he throws himself into an all-out celebration of the ultimate in artificial and unnatural pleasure. Surrendering to religious and profane literature, morbid paintings, overwhelming perfumes, expensive liquor, grotesque flowers, and reminiscences of his depraved past brings him unsurpassable pleasure, but his mental and physical condition may not be able to keep up. When Huysmans wrote Against the Grain, he did so to move away from the creative restrictions he felt the Naturalist school of literature imposed on him. According to him, “it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.” Instead, he dedicated Naturalism’s attention to detail to just one extraordinary, perverse individual, Des Esseintes—fully expecting the resulting work to fail critically and commercially. That the novel would become a scandalous success, and would define Decadence as a movement and ideology, was far beyond his expectations. Oscar Wilde was a well-known admirer of the novel, and drew heavily from it to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. During his trial in 1895, Wilde all but confirmed that the “poisonous French novel” in his work refers to Against the Grain. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the first unabridged English edition, which was translated anonymously and published by Groves & Michaux in 1926. It reinstates passages that were considered too obscene in previous editions, and includes a preface Huysmans wrote twenty years after the first publication of the book.
The misfortunes of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden clerk working for the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, form the subject of J.-K. Huysmans’ blackly comic novella, Drifting (À vau-l’eau). At first glance, Folantin’s problems seem to be a world away from those of Jean Floressas des Esseintes, the aristocratic anti-hero of Huysmans’ Decadent classic Against Nature, written just two years later in 1884. But the two men share more than just a first name: like des Esseintes, Folantin is in the throes of an existential crisis: alienated from a Paris undergoing rapid modernisation, the pace of social change leaves him feeling out of place, impotent, a small cog in an impersonal commercial world. Through the distorting lens of Huysmans’ dark sense of humour, the dyspeptic Folantin is transformed into a modern-day Ulysses, and his tortuous quest through the streets of Haussmann’s Paris to find a capable housekeeper and a decent meal reaches its conclusion in one of the most daring anti-climaxes – literally speaking – in the whole of nineteenth century fiction. This new translation by Brendan King includes, for the first time in English, a contemporary profile of Huysmans’ life and work in which the author plays both interviewer and interviewee, and which was published pseudonymously for the journal, Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui (Men of Today) in 1885. “[The] Iliad of indigestion.” James Huneker, Unicorns
Certain Artists makes for compelling reading. Huysmans’ idiosyncratic assessments throw light on his aesthetic preoccupations, past and present, and hint at the spiritual journey he was about to undertake. It includes over 140 black and white illustrations, as well as an introduction, setting the book in the context of its time, comprehensive notes, and a glossary of the artists mentioned. First published in 1889, but never before translated into English, this second collection of J.-K. Huysmans’ art criticism serves as a companion to the author’s iconoclastic Modern Art (L’Art moderne) of 1883. Unlike the earlier volume, Huysmans wastes little time lambasting the art of the establishment, the Academic painters whose work had lined the annual Salon for years. Instead, he concentrates on a series of his own artistic enthusiasms, which he explores with his trademark spleen and invective. There are extended analyses of Edgar Degas’s controversial portraits of women at their toilette; of Odilon Redon’s monstrous and disturbing engravings, of Gustave Moreau’s heiratic paintings that had such a powerful influence on Against Nature; and of Félicien Rops, whose Satanic engravings, particularly his images of women as agents of the devil, would haunt Huysmans’ subsequent novel, Là-bas, of 1891.
One of Huysmans' objects in writing L'Oblat was to present a vivid but accurate account of the life of a French religious community at the beginning of the century. He wished, in fact, to emulate the Flemish sculptors who, in the figurines in Dijon Museum which are described in the book, had represented "the monastic humanity of their time, merry or melancholy, phlegmatic or fervent".' Robert Baldick in The Life of J.-K. Huysmans 'The Oblate of 1903 is the last of his Durtal novels, and perhaps the least read of his works. But this new translation by Brendan King, for the publisher Dedalus, may help to put the novel back on the literary radar. Like all the novels featuring the writer Durtal, it is essentially autobiographical. Like Durtal, Huysmans had joined a Benedictine community as a lay associate who shared the liturgical life of the monastery, as an oblate. And like his alter ego, he had to abandon the project – in his case, at the monastery of St Martin in Ligugé, which features in The Oblate as the monastery of Val-des-Saints – when the monastery was dissolved following the passing of the law on associations by the anti-clerical government of 1901, which effectively banished the religious orders from France. What he had hoped to be a lifetime refuge turned into an intense monastic interlude of two years... Brendan King’s translation is so good as to read effortlessly, with the minor quibble that he calls children “kids”. The cover is striking: Zurbarán’s St Francis.' Melanie McDonagh in The Catholic Herald
Huysmans novel, though it is clearly rooted in the preoccupations of the late 19th century, is remarkably prophetic about the concerns of our own recent fin de siecle. With its allusions to, amongst other things, Satanic child abuse, alternative medicine, New Age philosophy and female sexuality, the novel has clearly a lot to say to a contemporary audience. As with most of Huysmans' books, the pleasure in reading is not necessarily from its overarching plot-line, but in set pieces, such as the extraordinary sequences in which Gilles de Rais wanders through a wood that suddenly metamorphoses into a series of copulating organic forms, the justly famous word-painting of Matthias Grunewald's Crucifixion altar-piece, or the brutally erotic scenes, crackling with sexual tension, between Durtal and Madame Chantelouve. If it is about anything, La-Bas is about Good and Evil. This enlightening new translation will be especially useful to students of literature. Not only does it contain an introduction that puts Huysmans in context for those who are new to his work, it also includes extensive notes to unlock the mass of obscure words that litter the text, and references to a vast array of scientists, false messiahs and misfits whose ideas went into the concoction of this strangely fascinating book." Beryl Bainbridge in The Spectator �This novel is one of the key texts of the Decadent movement of the 1890s and writhes with satanists, occultists, incubi (male demons), succubi (female demons) and intellectuals.” Sophia Martelli in The Observer "This Gothic shocker is not for the faint hearted..." Jerome Boyd Maunsell in The Times "The classic tale of satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century Paris, in an attractive new edition. The novel's enervated anti-hero, Durtal, is writing a book about Gilles de Rais, child-murderer and comrade in arms of Joan of Arc. When he's not swotting up on alchemy, visiting Rais' ruined castle and fantasising about a mystery woman, he is pondering Catholicism with his friends. But his sexual adventures and historical studies mesh when he's invited to witness a black mass. Strong meat for diseased imaginations." Time Out
First published in 1883, but never before translated into English, this collection of J.-K. Huysmans’ art criticism reveals the author of Against Nature to be as combative in his aesthetic opinions as he was in his literary ones. At a time when the Impressionists were still being ridiculed, or worse still ignored, Huysmans defiantly proclaimed Degas to be the best painter in France. He filled his pages with analyses of the works of artists whose genius and popularity have been confirmed by time: Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Gauguin, Mary Cassatt, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau. Huysmans intersperses his reviews of these independent artists with those of the annual Official Salon, whose conventional and dryly academic works he lambasts with his customary gusto and invective. This is the first complete translation of L’Art moderne, and includes 200 black and white illustrations, notes and a glossary of artists. ‘Huysmans reviewed the Salons of 1879-82 and the Independent Exhibitions of 1880-82 at considerable length. His articles, collected as L’Art moderne (1883), have never before been translated into English, probably because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Brendan King, who has already translated most of Huysmans’s fiction, has produced an excellent version. Rarely can it have been such fun to read translated denunciations of so many forgotten French pictures. The edition also includes scores of small black and white illustrations, which can easily be Googled into colour.’ Julian Barnes in The London Review of Books
Les Soeurs Vatard, described by its author as a "lewd but exact" slice of life, was J.-K. Huysmans' second novel. Huysmans abandoned poetry and turned to the novel at a time when the works of Emile Zola were intensely controversial; Les Soeurs Vatard is dedicated to Zola by "his fervent admirer and devoted friend." In it, Huysmans vividly depicts the scene that for his generation of French writers stood for the contemporary world: the brutal, teeming life of the industrial quarters of Paris in the 1870s. Huysmans' Vatard sisters are "Désirée, an urchin of fifteen, a brunette with large, pale eyes that were somewhat crossed, plump without being fat, attractive and clean; and Céline, the carouser, a big girl with clear eyes and hair the color of straw, a solid, vigorous girl whose blood raced and danced in her veins." The two are part of that "bizarre race of young women" who work as bookbinders, whose lives revolve around the gaslighted bindery works, the gaudy shop windows, and cheap wineshops that Huysmans describes with minute and colorful detail. His precisely observed sketches show that Naturalism as practiced by Buysmans had none of Zola' s emphasis on "scientific" determinism, but centered primarily on the faithful rendering of what he described as "living persons in real milieus." The Vatard Sisters is the first English translation of Les Soeurs Vatard.
Ailing, neurotic, and bored with the world, the nobleman Des Esseintes retreats to a secluded cottage in the French countryside. Determined to shun all contact with other people—demanding that even his live-in domestics must wear face-covering robes in his presence—he throws himself into an all-out celebration of the ultimate in artificial and unnatural pleasure. Surrendering to religious and profane literature, morbid paintings, overwhelming perfumes, expensive liquor, grotesque flowers, and reminiscences of his depraved past brings him unsurpassable pleasure, but his mental and physical condition may not be able to keep up. When Huysmans wrote Against the Grain, he did so to move away from the creative restrictions he felt the Naturalist school of literature imposed on him. According to him, “it limited itself to depicting common existence, and struggled, under the pretext of being true to life, to create characters who would be as close as possible to the average run of mankind.” Instead, he dedicated Naturalism’s attention to detail to just one extraordinary, perverse individual, Des Esseintes—fully expecting the resulting work to fail critically and commercially. That the novel would become a scandalous success, and would define Decadence as a movement and ideology, was far beyond his expectations. Oscar Wilde was a well-known admirer of the novel, and drew heavily from it to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. During his trial in 1895, Wilde all but confirmed that the “poisonous French novel” in his work refers to Against the Grain. This Standard Ebooks edition is based on the first unabridged English edition, which was translated anonymously and published by Groves & Michaux in 1926. It reinstates passages that were considered too obscene in previous editions, and includes a preface Huysmans wrote twenty years after the first publication of the book.
By the time of his death in 1933 Henri Bremond, priest and member of the elite Académie française, had established himself in France, and increasingly in England and the United States, as a distinguished historian of Christian spirituality and as a Catholic modernist who helped to shake the church out of its dogmatic slumbers by embracing "pure love," artistic-poetic expression, and mystical prayer as the privileged manifestations of spiritual truth. Drawing on substantial new scholarship in France, that has resuscitated and reinterpreted Bremond's work for our own times, and that sees Bremond as an important precursor of current trends in literary interpretation as well as spirituality, Gorday surveys the entirety of Bremond's corpus of writing, setting his work in its context of his personal struggles, as well as the wider setting of French historical and cultural development.
Known for depicting alienation, frustration, and the victimization of the individual by impenetrable bureaucracies, Kafka's works have given rise to the term Kafkaesque. This encyclopedia details Kafka's life and writings. Included are more than 800 alphabetically arranged entries on his works, characters, family members and acquaintances, themes, and other topics. Most of the entries cite works for further reading, and the Encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography.
This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.
This book provides new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies.
William Blake once wrote that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Inspired by these poetic terms, Jeffrey J. Kripal reveals how the works of scholars of mysticism are often rooted in their own mystical experiences, "roads of excess," which can both lead to important insights into these scholars' works and point us to our own "palaces of wisdom." In his new book, Kripal addresses the twentieth-century study of mysticism as a kind of mystical tradition in its own right, with its own unique histories, discourses, sociological dynamics, and rhetorics of secrecy. Fluidly combining autobiography and biography with scholarly exploration, Kripal takes us on a tour of comparative mystical thought by examining the lives and works of five major historians of mysticism—Evelyn Underhill, Louis Massignon, R. C. Zaehner, Agehananda Bharati, and Elliot Wolfson—as well as relating his own mystical experiences. The result, Kripal finds, is seven "palaces of wisdom": the religious power of excess, the necessity of distance in the study of mysticism, the relationship between the mystical and art, the dilemmas of male subjectivity and modern heterosexuality, a call for ethical criticism, the paradox of the insider-outsider problem in the study of religion, and the magical power of texts and their interpretation. An original and penetrating analysis of modern scholarship and scholars of mysticism, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom is also a persuasive demonstration of the way this scholarly activity is itself a mystical phenomenon.
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