In July of 1890, Oscar Wilde published A Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time in Lippincott's Magazine. Orange/Blue Contrast: In the first chapter Des Esseintes redecorates his salon, seeking out interesting and unusual colors. However it is important to recognise Huysmans's debt to Baudelaire, as many of the themes and motifs of his book - the egotism, perversity, artificial sensations, finding beauty in 'le mal', the sense of ennui and fatigue - were formulated by Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal and Spleen de Paris. Is it any good, this story about a man pottering about his house, living in his head, his imagination feeding off itself, slowly going mad?

Hmm…bring to mind zero down, adjustable rate mortgages, the culture of debt and overnight lines to be the first to own a new release videogame or Apple product to mind? For example, his two servants (of course he has servants) live and work on a separate floor of the house to him and he usually communicates with them by ringing bells. The leading figures of the movement included the two French men, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, but Symbolism was not limited to France with other practitioners including the Norwegian Edvard Munch, the Austrian Gustav Klimt and the British Aubrey Beardsley.

There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it". It was the same with his Rembrandts…and indeed, just as the most beautiful tune in the world becomes vulgar and unbearable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the barrel-organs make it their own, the work of art which causes a stir among phony artists, which the stupid find nothing to protest about…becomes in the same away polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive to the initiated…incomprehensible successes had spoiled forever pictures and books once dear to him…he would (ask) himself whether his instincts were getting blunted, whether he wasn’t being taken in. The yellow book is apparently confirmed by Wilde to be a thematic allusion to Huysmans's A Rebours in Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde. He was shown, too, a sled picturesquely placed on a snow-white bearskin, a library of rare books in suitably-coloured bindings and the remains of an unfortunate tortoise whose shell had been coated with gold paint.

A rebours was indeed part of a 'poisonous' Decadent French literature, and was identified by Arthur Symons as 'the breviary of the Decadence'. He found, too, a peculiar pleasure in being…the only person up and about amid sleeping shadow-enshrouded houses…a singular satisfaction know to late night workers, when drawing aside the curtain of their window, they realize that everything around them is dark, that all is silent, that all is dead. I have this idea that people are translating old texts better now than they used to; for one, translation studies is growing in academia, and for two, translators are less interested in “smoothing over” some roughnesses or X-ratednesses to attract “sensitive” readers.However, he certainly likes them fancy duds, to judge by some of the descriptions - "suits of white velvet with gold-laced waistcoasts," for example. Did he know a single person trying to lead an existence such as his own, one consigned to contemplation, one given up to daydreams…of appreciating the delicacy of a phrase, the subtlety of a painting, the quintessence of an idea…? I read the Muir translation of "The Metamorphosis" before I read the others--I have many issues with the Muir translation, so I'm always very discerning when looking for translations.

Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. Une seule passion, la femme, eût pu le retenir dans cet universel dédain qui le poignait, mais celle-là était, elle aussi, usée. But when you look at the final sentence (well, it’s 2 sentences, the whole passage, so the final set of clauses I mean), I think Baldick comes out ahead, surprisingly. Landow created the HTML design and formatted the text, adding French accents, which the Gutenberg text omits, and both ilustrations and links to materials on this site. In the end, “whatever he tried, an immense feeling of ennui oppressed him…then his health grew weaker and his nervous system more strained,” until he finally decides to create a sanctuary of intellectual and artistic stimulation off in the suburbs, near enough to Paris to reassure him, but far enough away to isolate him from “a hateful age of undignified boorishness.Some, educated like him in religious institutions, had preserved the special stamp this education confers…and hid from each other the bouts they indulged in with whores, shamefacedly avoiding the others eyes as if it were a crime. Against Nature displays a profound disgust for women as well as an effete sensibility that rejected `normality' and convention. At the very moment that Wilde was falling in with social patterns, he was confronted with a book which even in its title defied them. And if that doesn’t sound suspiciously like the world of 2013, then you’re just not paying attention.

One passion and one only—woman—might have arrested the universal contempt that was taking hold of him, but that passion like the rest had been exhausted. Now, I think of myself as a Huysmans 'completist,' and would have thought that I have a copy of just about every edition. This is indeed an unusually structured novel, in terms of the fact that there is little or no dialogue. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.Those unfamiliar with the style and ideology may find it difficult to relate to, not least because there is no real plot to speak of. Another French text mentioned in Dorian Gray is Theophile Gautier's collection of poems 'Emaux et Camees' (Enamels and Cameos), and it was in Gautier's prefatory 'note' to the 1868 edition of Fleurs du mal that the phrase 'Decadence' was used to describe this literature of the later nineteenth century (it had been used earlier in the century by Desiré Nisard to describe, pejoratively, Latin poets of the late Roman Empire).