Recommendations
Books Like À Rebours
Best books to read after À Rebours by Huysmans
Readers who respond to À Rebours's founding of Decadence, its portrait of the aesthete Des Esseintes retreating from nature into art, and Huysmans's systematic sensualism will find the wider tradition of Decadent and aestheticist fiction.
- 1Buy
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde incorporated À Rebours directly into The Picture of Dorian Gray as 'the yellow book' that corrupts Dorian: his novel is the most important English inheritor of the Huysmans aesthetic, and reading both books together shows the translation of the Decadent worldview from French to English.
- 2Buy
Là-Bas
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The second of the Durtal tetralogy: where À Rebours shows Des Esseintes's aesthetic withdrawal from the world, Là-Bas shows Durtal's investigation of Satanism and the occult, which is the next stage in Huysmans's journey from aestheticism toward spiritual reality.
- 3Buy
Les Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire is the essential predecessor of À Rebours: Des Esseintes's library is dominated by Baudelaire, and the Decadent aesthetic that Huysmans embodies is the direct development of Baudelaire's theory of art as the transcendence of nature through imaginative transformation.
- 4Buy
Axël
by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Villiers's symbolist drama (1890) is the theatrical equivalent of À Rebours: Axël, like Des Esseintes, withdraws from the world in favor of the ideal, and his famous rejection of life ('live? our servants will do that for us') is the Symbolist manifesto that parallels Huysmans's Decadent manifesto.
- 5Buy
The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall
Radclyffe Hall's novel shows what happens when the aestheticist withdrawal from ordinary life is given a social and political rather than purely aesthetic content: the comparison between À Rebours's aesthetic withdrawal and Hall's social withdrawal illuminates both the possibilities and the limits of withdrawal as a literary strategy.
- 6Buy
Dorian Gray's Library
by Various
The books that Des Esseintes reads in À Rebours — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, the Decadent Latin poets (Petronius, Apuleius, the Late Antique authors) — constitute a Decadent reading list that is itself one of the novel's most influential features: following Des Esseintes's library into its actual sources is the most rewarding way to extend the experience of À Rebours.
- 7Buy
En Route
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
En Route (1895) shows the destination of the journey that À Rebours begins: the aesthete who withdrew from the world in À Rebours eventually finds in Catholicism the only spiritual system adequate to his aesthetic sensibility, and the contrast between Des Esseintes's artificial paradise and Durtal's monastic reality shows the full arc of Huysmans's spiritual biography.
- 8Buy
The Decay of Lying
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's 1889 dialogue, in which Vivian argues that life imitates art rather than art imitating life, is the most concise English statement of the aesthetic philosophy that À Rebours embodies: Des Esseintes's preference for the artificial over the natural is Wilde's 'decay of lying' performed as a way of life.
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