The Symbolist Movement in Literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gérard de Nerval; Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; Arthur Rimbaud; Paul Verlaine; Jules Laforgue; Stéphane Mallarmé; Huysmans; Maeterlinck.
Essays by: Balzac; Prosper Merimée; Théophile Gautier; Gustave Flaubert; Charles Baudelaire; Edmond and Jules de Goncourt; Leon Cladel; A Note on Zola's Method.
Symons on Huysmans' style
Barbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor, it is - especially in regard to things seen - extraordinarily expressive, with all the shades of a painter's palette. Elaborately and deliberately perverse, it is in its very perversity that Huysmans' work - so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial - comes to represent, as the work of no other writer can be said to do, the main tendencies, the chief results, of the Decadent movement in literature. (Arthur Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature", 1893)