Joris-Karl Huysmans

Marc Fumaroli

La 4e de couverture indique : "La Bible de l'esprit décadent et de la " charogne " 1900. A travers le personnage de des Esseintes, Huysmans n'a pas seulement résumé, immortalisé les torpeurs, les langueurs, les névroses vénéneuses et perverses du siècle finissant. Des Esseintes est aussi un héros kierkegaardien, à la fois grotesque et pathétique, une des plus fortes figures de l'angoisse qu'ait laissées notre littérature. Fils spirituel de René et de la génération du mal du siècle, il annonce à bien des égards le Bardamu de Céline et le Roquentin de La Nausée."

A Rebours by Joris-karl Huysmans

Against Nature is Huysmans's great fin-de-siècle novel anticipating many of the strains of modernism in its appreciation of Baudelaire, Moreau, Redon, Mallarmé and Poe. This new translation is supplemented by a critically up-to-date introduction and indispensable notes which enhance the understanding of a highly allusive work.

Against Nature

A Journey Into the Self

Là Bas

Delving deep into human psychology, Huysmans explains the formation of a personality and how some childhood deprivations force Des Esseintes to abandon the world and create one of his own. Cited differently as a ghost story, horror story and mystery, the novel is also an expedition in psychology as well as emblem of 19th century decadence of literature.

Easyread Large Edition

Against the Grain

The Damned (Là-bas).Joris-Karl Huysmans.The Damned (Là-bas) By Joris-Karl Huysmans Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans (February 5, 1848 - May 12, 1907) was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans; he is most famous for the novel À rebours. His style is remarkable for its idiosyncratic use of the French language, wide-ranging vocabulary, wealth of detailed and sensuous description, and biting, satirical wit. The novels are also noteworthy for their encyclopaedic documentation, ranging from the catalogue of decadent Latin authors in À rebours to the discussion of the symbology of Christian architecture in La Cathédrale. Huysmans' work expresses a disgust with modern life and a deep pessimism, which led the author first to the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer then to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

The Damned (là-Bas)

Yves Hersant

" Le mal d'âmes ", comme disait Mallarmé, à la fin du siècle, et " le bizarre attardement, au Paris actuel, de la démonialité ". Gilles de Rais mène le bal par l'intermédiaire d'un historien, Durtal, assoiffé de surnaturel et dont l'initiation sera faite par l'épouse hystérique et perverse d'un grand écrivain catholique. Messes noires et invocations sataniques s'ensuivent, qu'organise un prêtre excommunié, le chanoine Docre, qui s'est fait tracer sur la plante des pieds l'image de la croix afin de pouvoir la piétiner constamment et dont les plus innocents plaisirs sont de nourrir les souris blanches avec des hosties consacrées. Dans ce monde du sabbat et du blasphème, la raison ne survit que réfugiée dans une tour de Saint-Sulpice, où la femme du sonneur de cloches mitonne à l'intention des rares rescapés de divins pot-au-feu.

Là-bas

Virginia Finzi Ghisi

Controcorrente

A rebours

With the Flow

A Journey into the Self (Decadence from Dedalus)

La-Bas

En route

Joris-Karl Huysmans' shocking novel of an innocent's descent into a world of depraved, blasphemous rituals, The Damned caused a scandal when it was first published in nineteenth-century France. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction and notes by Terry Hale. Durtal, a shy, censorious man, is writing a biography of Gilles de Rais, the monstrous fifteenth-century child-murderer thought to be the original for 'Bluebeard'. Bored and disgusted by the vulgarity of everyday life, Durtal seeks spiritual solace by immersing himself in another age. But when he starts asking questions about Gilles's involvement in satanic rituals and is introduced to the exquisitely evil madame Chantelouve, he is soon drawn into a twilight world of black magic and erotic devilry in fin-de- siècle Paris. Published in 1891, The Damned cemented Huysmans's reputation as a writer at the forefront of the avant-garde and as one of the most challenging and innovative figures in European literature. In his introduction, Terry Hale discusses autobiographical aspects of this scandalous novel, Huysmans's fascination with occult practices, the real woman who inspired the character of Madame Chantelouve and other literary accounts of Gilles de Rais. This edition also includes further reading, a chronology and notes. Joris-Karl Huysmans 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.

The Damned La-Bas

Jean Louis Forain

Jean-Francois Raffaelli

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show of brasserie paintings at La Vie Moderne gallery, J.-K. Huysmans' Parisian Sketches shares with these vibrant Impressionist works a fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, an exuberant Paris in the era of the OpÃ(c)ra Garnier and the Folies-Bergères. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, whom Huysmans championed when it was unfashionable to do so, Parisian Sketches is an all-out assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed impressions - of cafÃ(c) concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of run-down slums and forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny 'City of Light'- Parisian Sketches recreates the Paris of the bal masquÃ(c) and the cancan, the brasseries à femme and the buveurs d'absinthe, all captured with an intimacy and an immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.

Parisian Sketches

L'abisso

Mystik und Massen

Lourdes

Um dândi isola-se do mundo para fugir à mediocridade burguesa.

Às avessas

A cura di Bruno Nacci Traduzione di Ida Sassi Edizione integrale Controcorrente è considerato il capolavoro del decadentismo europeo. Il suo protagonista, Des Esseintes, è l'ultimo dei grandi dandy della letteratura ottocentesca, ma è anche uno dei primi nichilisti integrali del mondo contemporaneo, tornato oggi di grande attualità. Espressione di una raffinatezza e di un estetismo portati alle estreme conseguenze, il romanzo prelude, nelle ultime pagine, alla conversione religiosa, già intuita da Barbey d'Aurevilly: «Dopo un libro simile, al suo autore non resta che scegliere tra la bocca di una pistola o i piedi della croce».Joris-Karl Huysmansnacque a Parigi nel 1848. Dopo aver esordito con le prose di Le Drageoir à épices (1874), fu ammesso nel ristretto circolo di Zola. Scrisse romanzi d'impianto naturalista come Marthe, histoire d'une fille (1876), fino a scegliere una strada originale che culminò con À rebours (Controcorrente, 1884). Nell'ultima fase della sua vita si accostò al cattolicesimo, divenendo oblato benedettino, esperienza anticipata in En route (1895). Morì a Parigi nel 1907.

Originally published in book form in French in 1887, Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Dilemma remains a particularly nasty little tale, a mordantly satiric and cruel account of bourgeois greed and manipulation that holds up as clear a mirror to today's neoliberalist times as it did to the French fin-de-siècle. Written smack in-between Huysmans' most famous works--his 1881 Against Nature, which came to define the Decadent movement, and his 1891 exploration of Satanism, Down There--A Dilemma presents some of Huysmans' most memorable characters, including Madame Champagne, the self-appointed Parisian protector of women in need, and the carnal would-be sophisticate notary Le Ponsart, who wages a war of words with the bereft pregnant mistress of his deceased grandson with devastating consequences. In its unflinching portrayal of how authoritarian language can be used and abused as a weapon, this novella stands as Huysmans' indictment of the underlying crime of the novel itself: a language apparatus employed to maintain the appetites of the ruling class. Earning a wage through a career in the French civil service, Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) quietly explored the extremes of human nature and artifice through a series of books that influenced a number of different literary movements: from the grey and grimy Naturalism of books like Marthe and Downstream to the cornerstones of the Decadent movement, Against Nature and the Satanist classic Down There, the dream-ridden Surrealist favorite, Becalmed, and his Catholic novels, The Cathedral and The Oblate.

A Dilemma

"The Vatard Sisters brought Huysmans to the notice of the public and revealed him as a man who could paint word-pictures which put earlier practitioners like Gautier and Edmond de Goncourt in the shade...The novel is a story of two working-class sisters, but the main protagonist is Paris, suburban Paris, the Paris of railway stations, cheap restaurants and café-concerts...and the passages that describe the music-halls and crowds of the Avenue de Maine and the Boulevard Saint Michel, or the railway yard seen from the back window of the sisters' bedroom, have a visual immediacy...a kind of energy, a force of personality, which are utterly unusual in Huysmans' work..."âe ̈Anita Brookner in The Genius of the Future

Joris-Karl Huysmans

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