Recommendations
Books Like À rebours by J.-K. Huysmans
Books for readers obsessed with extreme aestheticism and the failure of sensation as a religion
À rebours (1884) is the Decadent movement's canonical novel — Des Esseintes constructs a total artificial world and is destroyed by it. These 8 books share its extreme aestheticism, its contempt for nature, and its diagnosis of the aesthete as a failed believer.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Wilde said À rebours was the "poisonous book" that corrupted Dorian; the two novels are mirrors — Des Esseintes retreats from society while Dorian stays in it and corrupts everything he touches
- 2Buy on Amazon
Là-bas
by J.-K. Huysmans
Huysmans's own sequel to the Decadent worldview — Durtal investigates Satanism and medieval mysticism as Des Esseintes investigated perfume and jewels
- 3Buy on Amazon
À vau-l'eau
by J.-K. Huysmans
Earlier Huysmans novella (1882) in which a petty Parisian clerk tries and fails to find a decent meal every day — Naturalism dissolving into the same hypersensitive futility that defines Des Esseintes
- 4Buy on Amazon
À rebours
by J.-K. Huysmans
The source itself — Des Esseintes's artificial paradise is the fullest expression of Decadent aesthetics as a philosophical position rather than a lifestyle
- 5
Buy on AmazonMademoiselle de Maupin
by Théophile Gautier
The preface is the founding text of l'art pour l'art — art has no moral utility and that is its highest virtue; À rebours canonizes Gautier as Des Esseintes's favorite author
- 6
Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
Des Esseintes reads Baudelaire obsessively; Flowers of Evil provides the Decadent aesthetic's emotional core — beauty found in corruption, sensation pushed to its limit
- 7Buy on Amazon
Monsieur de Phocas
by Jean Lorrain
French Decadent novel (1901) in which a nobleman is consumed by a desire for a particular shade of green in eyes — as specific and as self-destructive as Des Esseintes's obsessions
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The founding text of the hypersensitive protagonist destroyed by his own sensibility — Werther's romantic excess and Des Esseintes's aesthetic excess are the same structure a century apart
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