ROBERT ZIEGLER is professor of Liberal Studies at Montana Tech, USA. He has published widely on turn-of-the century French literature and French Decadence, and is the author of four books on the fin de siècle:
Beauty Raises the Dead (2001), selected as a Choice outstanding academic book,
The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans (2004),
The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (2007), and
Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction (2009).