This is a comparative and interdisciplinary book exploring a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France, and its neighbours, in the period 1870-1914. Part One centres on France, and assembles essays on the prose, poetry and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, on avant-garde dance and performance, on women's writing and on early cinema.

Contents: Part 1: Mallarme and the "siecle finissant", Peter Dayan; disinterested Narcissus - the play of politics in decadent form, Jennifer Birkett; experiment in women's writing in the "fin de siecle", Alison Finch; the poetry of symbolism and decadence, Clive Scott; the difficult distance - Mallarme and the symbolist stage, Michael Holland; the kinaesthetics of chance - Mallarme's "Un Coup de des" and avant-garde choreography, Dee Reynolds; Villiers, Verne, Lumiere - the business of immortality, Ian Christie; text and image, allegory and symbol in Gustave Moreau's "Jupiter et Semele", Peter Cooke; between medicine and hermeticism - "the" unconscious in the "fin de siecle". Part 2: primitivism, celticism and morbidity in the Atlantic "fin de siecle", Scott Ashley; Belgian symbolism and the question of Belgian literary identity, Patrick Laude; temporary aesthetes - decadence and symbolism in Germany and Austria, Robert Vilain; the war of the wor(l)ds - symbolist decadent literature and discourses of power in finisecular Spain, Richard A. Cardwell; French symbolism and Italian poetry, 1880-1920, Shirley W. Winall; from Mallarme to Pound - the "Franco-Anglo-American" axis, Patrick McGuinness.