Matter Pools: Fluidity and Containment in French Decadent Literature: Essays in Honour of Robert E. Ziegler
Document Type
Book
Publication Date
7-3-2017
Abstract
‘Matter pools’, an expression drawn from Robert Ziegler’s Octave Mirbeau’s Fictions of the Transcendental (2015), evokes the generally transparent materials comprising the seemingly impervious containers scattered across the decadent imaginary and the fluid movement that occurs through the walls of glass aquariums, reliquaries, terrariums, hot houses, display cases, vases, mirrors, windows, water surfaces, and even bodies and nations. Despite much critical fascination with the decadent treatment of artifice and decay, religion and morality (A.E. Carter, Charles Bernheimer, Jean de Palacio, Pierre Citti, Séverine Jouve, Jean Pierrot, and others), there is surprisingly little scholarship dedicated to the perceptual and existential vertigo that results within decadent fictions when retaining walls of all kinds become porous, or inversely, when liquids and mists turn into impenetrable barriers. Table of Contents Introduction to Matter Pools: Fluidity and Containment in French Decadent Literature (Essays in Honour of Robert E. Ziegler) Jennifer Forrest & Elizabeth Emery Decadent Anarchists and Anarchist Decadents in 1880s Paris Richard Shryock Rachilde’s Deliquescent Walls: Speaking Silences Melanie Hawthorne Comment la chronique devient conte: fluidité et contrainte dans la constitution des recueils de Marcel Schwob Cédric de Guido An English Cover-Up: Masks, Murders, and English Cruelty in Goncourt, Lorrain, and Schwob Hannah Scott Zola and the Physical Geography of War Nicholas White Reflections at a Stagnant Pool: Writing Mystical Experience in Huysmans’s En route Willemijn Don The Temptation of the Material in Jean Lorrain’s Fairy Tales: ‘La Princesse sous verre’ and ‘La Princesse Neigefleur’ Ana Oancea From Decadence in Huysmans and Barbey to Regeneration in Gide and Proust Allan H. Pasco De la fluidité des aquariums Julia Przyboś Chairs mystiques et transparentes chez J.-K. Huysmans et Marcel Batilliat Marc Smeets
DOI
10.1080/14787318.2017.1386881
MSU Digital Commons Citation
Forrest, Jennifer and Emery, Elizabeth, "Matter Pools: Fluidity and Containment in French Decadent Literature: Essays in Honour of Robert E. Ziegler" (2017). Department of World Languages and Cultures Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works. 3.
https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/modernlang-literatures-facpubs/3