Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin De Siecle

By fostering a belief in the unknowability of objective reality and the impending end of the world, the Decadents situate themselves in opposition to what was satisfying, healthy, and present. Drawing on psychoanalytic studies of mourning from Freud and Melanie Klein to Donald Winnicott and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, this book examines the unique way in which the Decadents defined loss as a precondition to literary creation.