Huysmans and Fin de Siècle Paris

Abstract

Huysmans was a Parisian author closely associated with the decadent movement. His importance to urban literary studies lies in his transitional role, depicting a Paris poised between that of the naturalists and the modernists. While his early novels were written under the spell of Émile Zola, he broke definitively with naturalism in À rebours [Against Nature] (1884) and was a champion of impressionism in journalism collected in L’art moderne (1883). Following the publication of À rebours, Huysmans became a leading international figure in the decadent movement, and it was during this period that he wrote Là-Bas [The Damned] (1891), a novel set in the world of fin de siècle Parisian Satanism. In the later 1890s, however, he found religion and, in his final decade of his life, spent time away from Paris on spiritual retreats, experiences he dramatized in the trilogy of novels En Route (1895), La Cathédrale (1898), an encomium to Notre-Dame de Chartres, and L’Oblat (1903).