Book
Matter Pools: Fluidity and Containment in French Decadent Literature: Essays in Honour of Robert E. Ziegler
(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
Keywords
- Decadence,
- fluidity,
- aquariums,
- glass cases,
- transparent materials,
- Robert Ziegler
Disciplines
Publication Date
July 3, 2017
DOI
10.1080/14787318.2017.1386881
Citation Information
Jennifer Forrest and Elizabeth Emery. Matter Pools: Fluidity and Containment in French Decadent Literature: Essays in Honour of Robert E. Ziegler. Vol. 21 (2017) p. 93 - 103 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/elizabeth-emery/13/