The Symbolist Movement in Literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons, is a work of literary criticism first published in 1899. The book was originally known as The Decadent Movement in Literature. Symons had previously published an essay entitled "The Decadent Movement in Literature" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1893. The 1919 edition notes that "Without symbolism there can be no literature; indeed, not even language. Words themselves are symbols. Symbolism began with the first words uttered by the first man as he named every living thing. In a symbol there is concealment, yet revelation. All of these have greatly contributed to our understanding of symbolism."
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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)
