Behind the Masks of Jean Lorrain’s ‘Monsieur de Bougrelon’
As eras accrue and each literary movement gives way to the next, canon space (which remains fixed) becomes survival of the fittest. Ludwig Tieck, William Congreve, and Francisco de Quevedo were household names in their day, but are now anthology also-rans of their respective movements.
So who gets to be heard from among those morbid aesthetes known as The Decadents? features most prominently as the movement’s inaugural figure. And , certainly, though he is more than representative. abides, but as a pithy epigrammatist. If survives, it will likely be under an alternative rubric (her is a proto-feminist, gender-fluid masterpiece). Dyed-in-the-wool Decadents like , , , , and are in all likelihood battling it out for one or zero paragraphs in at present, and enjoying a boost from an extended cameo in .)
