Against Nature - Couverture souple

Huysmans, J. K.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0140440860 ISBN 13 : 9780140440867

Editeur : Penguin Books Ltd, 1966

Synopsis

Book by Huysmans JorisKarl

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A Rebours) is translated by Robert Baldick with an introduction by Patrick McGuinness in Penguin Classics. A wildly original fin-de-siècle novel, Against Nature contains only one character. Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where her indulges his taste for luxury and excess. Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Against Nature, in the words of the author, exploded 'like a meteorite' and has enjoyed a cult following to this day. This revised edition of Robert Baldick's lucid translation features a new introduction and a chronology, and reproduces Huysmans's original 1903 preface as well as a selection of reviews from writers including Mallarmé, Zola and Wilde. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) is now recognized as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature and an acknowledged principal architect of the fin-de-siècle imagination. He was a career civil servant who wrote ten novels, most notably A Rebours and Là-Bas. If you enjoyed Against Nature, you might like Huysmans's The Damned (La-Bas), also available in Penguin Classics.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans 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 Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero, who loathes 19th century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. Against Nature containes many themes which became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from naturalism and became the ultimate example of decadent literature. Jean Des Esseintes is the last member of a powerful and once proud noble family. He has lived an extremely decadent life in Paris which has left him disgusted with human society. Without telling anyone, he absconds to a house in the countryside. He fills the house with his eclectic art collection and decides to spend the rest of his life in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. Throughout his intellectual experiments, he recalls various debauched events and love affairs of his past in Paris.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1966
• ISBN 10: 0140440860
• ISBN 13: 9780140440867
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 224