The Symbolist Movement in Literature

An examination of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist movement in France and Belgium, tracing its origins, aesthetic principles, and principal figures. It opens with a theoretical account of symbolism as the representation of unseen realities through suggestive, often musical language, then proceeds through critical studies of individual writers—Balzac, Mérimée, Gérard de Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the Goncourts, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Cladel, Zola (method discussed), Mallarmé, Verlaine, Huysmans (early and later), Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Maeterlinck—assessing their techniques, moods, and departures from realism. The book concludes with reflections on mysticism, synesthetic imagery, and a bibliography and notes.