Recommendations
Books Like Les Chevaux de Diomède
Best books to read after Les Chevaux de Diomède by Gourmont
Readers who respond to Les Chevaux de Diomède's combination of aesthetic theory and erotic narrative, Gourmont's prose precision, and the Symbolist intellectual novel will find the wider tradition of French Symbolist fiction.
- 1Buy
Sixtine
by Rémy de Gourmont
Sixtine (1890) is Gourmont's first novel and the direct predecessor of Les Chevaux de Diomède: the same intellectual protagonist, the same simultaneous treatment of erotic passion and aesthetic theory, the same prose precision — reading Sixtine first shows the development of Gourmont's fictional method.
- 2Buy
Une nuit au Luxembourg
by Rémy de Gourmont
Une nuit au Luxembourg (1906) is the most accessible of Gourmont's novels and the most philosophical: a night-long conversation in the Luxembourg Gardens about God, beauty, and desire, it shows the same intellectual range as Les Chevaux de Diomède in a more concentrated and accessible form.
- 3Buy
À Rebours
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
À Rebours (1884) is the founding text of the French Symbolist-Decadent aesthetic that Les Chevaux de Diomède inhabits: Des Esseintes's systematic exploration of aesthetic sensation is the predecessor of Diomède's systematic erotic education, and both novels treat experience as primarily aesthetic and intellectual rather than moral or social.
- 4Buy
Bruges-la-Morte
by Georges Rodenbach
Rodenbach's 1892 novel is the most important Belgian Symbolist predecessor: where Gourmont's method is intellectual-analytic, Rodenbach's is atmospheric-impressionistic, and the comparison between the two shows the range of strategies available to the Symbolist novel — both belong to the same literary moment and the same cultural world.
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Le Livre des masques
by Rémy de Gourmont
Gourmont's two-volume collection of Symbolist criticism (1896-1898) is the essential theoretical companion to Les Chevaux de Diomède: his essays on Mallarmé, Verlaine, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and other Symbolist writers show the intellectual framework within which the novel operates, and the critical intelligence behind the fiction.
- 6Buy
Axël
by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
Villiers's 1890 Symbolist drama is the most important theatrical predecessor of Les Chevaux de Diomède's intellectual aesthetic: the opposition between the ideal and the real that Axël embodies in drama is what Gourmont analyzes in fiction as the opposition between the imagination of experience and the experience itself.
- 7Buy
Le Vice suprême
by Joséphin Péladan
Péladan's 1884 novel is the occult-Rosicrucian alternative to Gourmont's purely aesthetic approach: where Gourmont treats the liberation from erotic compulsion as a matter of aesthetic education (the development of independent critical intelligence), Péladan treats it as a matter of spiritual initiation (the Rosicrucian mastery of the demonic feminine).
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Le Problème du style
by Rémy de Gourmont
Gourmont's 1902 essay on style is the theoretical text that most directly illuminates the practice of Les Chevaux de Diomède: his argument that style is inseparable from the individual sensibility that creates it — that there is no neutral style, only the style of a particular person — is the principle underlying his fictional prose.
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