-
Seasonal Offer:
This title is part of our Seasonal Offers promotion.
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in Against Nature (Oxford World's Classics) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
`It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private museum of high taste, he offers Huysmans's readers a treasure trove of cultural delights which anticipates many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This must be one of the strangest fictional books ever written, it is not so much a story as a decadent manifesto. The anti-hero Des Esseintes attempts of escape the boredom of Paris by building a home and lifestyle for himself on decadent principles. His attempts cover everything from the food he ingests in a rather unusual manner, to his pet tortoise with its decorated carapace. The language and the style of the book are very rich and highly textured. It is the type of book you will love or hate but you are unlikely to be able to feel apathetic towards it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
À Rebours: Un Ménagerie de la Décadence....
11 April 2011
Format: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
*
*
`[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
*
Was this review helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
