À rebours
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
À rebours (English translated title Against the Grain, or Against Nature) (1884) is a novel by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. It is a novel in which very little happens; its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character, and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero. À rebours contained many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic.
In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of "decadent" literature. À rebours was imitated by Oscar Wilde in several passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray. À rebours gained further notoriety as an exhibit during Wilde's trial in 1895, during which the prosecutor referred to the novel as a "sodomitical" book.
It is sometimes regarded as one of the most profound works in the history of decadent literature, especially because it successfully transcended the definition of Romanticism into Decadence.
External links
- Original French text of À rebours (http://cage.rug.ac.be/~dc/Literature/ARebours/)
- Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/2/3/4/12341/12341.txt), Project Gutenberg ebook in English
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