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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Symbolist Movement in Literature," Arthur Symons presents a rigorous exploration of the Symbolist literary movement, tracing its roots from late 19th-century France to its resonances in broader European literature. Symons employs a graceful, yet incisive literary style, characterized by a blend of critical analysis and poetic appreciation. He adeptly examines the works of pivotal figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Charles Baudelaire, highlighting their departure from realism towards a subjective artistic expression that seeks to evoke emotion through symbols rather than explicit imagery. This book not only serves as a historical document, but also as a critical examination of the existential notions underlying Symbolism, reflecting the wider cultural shifts of the time. Arthur Symons, a prominent poet and critic in his own right, was deeply embedded in the literary circles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His relationships with leading figures, coupled with his own inclination towards symbolism in his poetry, significantly informed his insights. Symons' extensive travels and his engagement with both English and French literature enabled him to provide a multifaceted understanding of the Symbolist movement, making his observations particularly rich and nuanced. Recommended for scholars and enthusiasts of literary movements, this book offers invaluable insight into how Symbolism reshaped literary landscapes. Symons' astute observations and passionate prose make this work an essential read, illuminating the transformative power of art and its reflection of the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Symbolist Movement in Literature
Table of Contents
Introduction
This is a book about how literature learns to say more by seeming to say less, exchanging statement for suggestion and surface for depth. Arthur Symons approaches his subject not as a pedant cataloging doctrines, but as a sensitive observer tracing the currents of taste that reshaped late nineteenth-century letters. He writes to orient readers to a movement that prized nuance, resonance, and the felt life of words. The result is an invitation to read differently: to listen for undertones, to pursue correspondences among the arts, and to treat meaning as something glimpsed, not seized outright.
The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a work of literary criticism that first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, in the fin-de-siècle moment when European culture questioned its own assumptions. Composed in English for an Anglophone readership, it surveys writers chiefly associated with France and Belgium, where Symbolism had taken root in poetry, drama, and prose. Symons writes from within that atmosphere of transition, when realism and naturalism were yielding ground to art that cherished mystery and inwardness. Without presuming to legislate a school, he charts a climate: a set of practices and predispositions that together altered what literature could attempt.
The book offers a sequence of essays that combine biography, aesthetic reflection, and close attention to style. Symons does not simply summarize manifestos; he describes how particular works feel and sound, and what kinds of experiences they make possible. His voice is urbane and attentive, measured yet warm, animated by an alert ear for cadence. The mood is exploratory rather than dogmatic, with a taste for clarification without flattening the unknown. Readers encounter a guided tour through poems, plays, and prose that value atmosphere, suggestion, and the musicality of language, culminating in a portrait of Symbolism as both method and mood.
Central to his account is the conviction that symbols are not ornaments but instruments of knowledge: they condense perception, gather echoes across senses, and make the invisible palpable. Symons treats dreams, reverie, and the half-lights of consciousness as legitimate subjects of art, attending to how tone and texture carry thought. He follows how writers seek purity of expression without abandoning complexity, how they court ambiguity without surrendering to vagueness. The book dwells on synesthetic effects, ritual and myth reimagined, and the ideal of poetry aspiring to the condition of music, all while insisting that discipline and form must steady intensity.
Symons also situates Symbolism in relation to its neighbors and rivals. Where realism trusted external detail, Symbolism trusts the evocative detail that gestures beyond itself; where rhetoric explains, Symbolism suggests. Yet he resists simple antagonisms. The essays show how the new movement borrows from earlier traditions and, in turn, reframes them, creating an art at once modern and steeped in memory. Throughout, he parses terms that were already slippery in his day, distinguishing decadence from mere morbidity and subtlety from obscurity. His method is comparative and patient, demonstrating how a style becomes a worldview rather than a mere fashion.
For contemporary readers, the book matters not only as a historical document but as a primer in slow attention. In an age saturated with information, Symons reminds us that indirection can deepen understanding, that the unsaid can be as eloquent as the said. His pages illuminate how literature converses with painting and music, how translation mediates across cultures, and how criticism can be an art of hospitality—bringing unfamiliar sensibilities into sympathetic focus. The questions he raises—about interiority, form, and the ethics of style—remain pertinent to debates about reading, creativity, and the value of difficulty in a hurried culture.
Approached on its own terms, this book is a companionable guide to a movement that made modern literature more spacious, more inward, and more daring. It offers orientation without finality, description without reduction, and advocacy without zealotry. Readers drawn to poetry, to theatre that breathes through silence, or to prose that shimmers with implication will find here a vocabulary for their intuitions and a framework for discovery. Symons’s chapters assemble a coherent path through a scattered terrain, so that by the end one has not a doctrine to memorize but a heightened sensibility—an ear tuned to suggestion and a mind quickened to mystery.
Synopsis
Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a study of late nineteenth-century writers who sought to express inner life through suggestion rather than direct statement. Opening with a general account of Symbolism as a reaction against realism and the descriptive precision of the Parnassians, Symons outlines a poetics based on music, evocation, and correspondences among senses and ideas. He situates the movement in a larger European shift from external representation to psychological nuance. The book’s purpose is explanatory and introductory: to familiarize English readers with the movement’s chief figures, methods, and aims, and to trace how their experiments reordered the priorities of modern literature.
Symons establishes a background in which Baudelaire, Poe (in French reception), and Wagner prepare the intellectual climate for Symbolism. He distinguishes Symbolism from Decadence while noting their overlap in taste and technique, especially in cultivating atmosphere and rarefied sensation. Against the models of objective description and rhetorical clarity, he stresses the Symbolist preference for multiple meanings and resonant images. This framework leads into a series of portraits that demonstrate how individual writers realized these principles in poetry, prose, and drama. By setting out shared concerns—music, suggestion, myth, and an inward gaze—Symons provides a through-line that connects diverse authors and national contexts.
The book turns to poets, beginning with Paul Verlaine as a pivotal transitional figure. Symons presents Verlaine’s ideal of musicality in verse, noting his soft cadences, tactful handling of mood, and nuanced vocabulary. Collections such as Fêtes galantes and Romances sans paroles illustrate a technique designed to hint rather than declare. Themes of religious yearning and intimate confession also appear, particularly in Sagesse. For Symons, Verlaine demonstrates how Symbolism reorients poetry toward fleeting impressions and tonal delicacy. The chapter emphasizes how his prosody and understated images form a bridge between Romantic subjectivity and Symbolist suggestion, establishing a key model for subsequent poets.
Arthur Rimbaud is treated as an innovator who radicalizes symbolism’s premises. Symons outlines his compressed career, emphasizing a deliberate pursuit of visionary intensity and new forms. A Season in Hell and the Illuminations embody experiments in prose poem and free rhythmic structures, fusing startling images with synesthetic effects. Symons highlights Rimbaud’s program of deranging conventional perception to reach unknown territories of feeling and language. The account also underscores his rapid withdrawal from literature, leaving a body of work whose influence far exceeded its volume. Rimbaud’s example illustrates how Symbolism could break with tradition to pursue an uncompromising exploration of consciousness.
Stéphane Mallarmé appears as the movement’s central theoretician and formal innovator. Symons explains his pursuit of pure poetry, where syntax, ellipsis, and spatial arrangement create a language of suggestion. L’Après-midi d’un faune and later experiments exemplify an art that seeks to approach the absolute through carefully orchestrated obscurity. Symons describes Mallarmé’s Paris gatherings as a nexus for Symbolist exchange, reinforcing his role as a guiding presence. Rather than plot or argument, Mallarmé privileges the resonance of words and the architecture of silence. The chapter presents his work as crystallizing Symbolist aims: the poem as an autonomous object that evokes an ideal beyond literal statement.
Jules Laforgue represents irony and colloquial daring within Symbolism. Symons emphasizes his blend of conversational tone with technical experiment, especially early forms of vers libre. In collections like Complaintes and Derniers vers, Laforgue uses masks and shifting personae to register modern disillusion and fleeting joy. The analysis shows how his light touch coexists with a careful calibration of sound and image, producing poems that balance parody with pathos. Laforgue’s contribution, as presented by Symons, is to widen the movement’s emotional and stylistic range, proving that Symbolist suggestion can accommodate skepticism and humor alongside reverie and musical refinement.
Symons broadens the scope from poetry to prose by examining Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and J.-K. Huysmans. Villiers’s tales and the drama Axël exemplify a high idealism articulated through fable-like situations, uncanny episodes, and a taste for the extraordinary. Huysmans’s novels, notably À rebours, display a cultivated sensibility turned inward, concerned with artifice, sensation, and the meticulous cataloging of aesthetic experience. Symons shows how both writers adapt Symbolist methods to narrative: character and incident serve atmosphere and idea rather than conventional plot. Their works illustrate the movement’s capacity to permeate fiction, shaping tone and structure as intensely as imagery.
The dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck is presented as the creator of a Symbolist theater of stillness and suspense. Symons describes plays such as Pelléas et Mélisande, The Intruder, and The Blind as staging inward states through minimal action, hushed dialogue, and suggestive settings. The characters often seem guided by forces they cannot see, with silence functioning as a principal medium. This approach transfers Symbolist techniques from lyric to stage, emphasizing mood and omen over psychology and event. Symons details how Maeterlinck’s dramaturgy relies on indirection and restraint, offering audiences a theater of atmosphere where the unsaid carries the central significance.
In closing, Symons assesses the movement’s methods and its diffusion beyond France and Belgium, noting its impact on the texture of modern writing. He restates Symbolism’s core aims—evocation, musical structure, and the search for equivalents to inner experience—while acknowledging the diversity of its practitioners. The book’s final emphasis is practical and descriptive: to provide English readers with a coherent map of authors, texts, and techniques that redefined poetic and narrative priorities. Symons presents Symbolism as neither a rigid school nor a passing fashion, but as a decisive reorientation of literature toward the suggestive and the spiritual in form and meaning.
Historical Context
Arthur Symons’s book emerged from the fin-de-siècle world straddling London and Paris, with a first edition in 1899 and a substantially revised edition in 1908. The urban geography matters: Paris, capital of the French Third Republic, and London, heart of the late-Victorian and Edwardian British Empire, were laboratories of modern life—electric light, new boulevards, cafés, railways, and mass journalism—accompanied by censorship scares and moral panics. Symons wrote after extended stays in France and Belgium in the 1890s, filtering Continental events for an English audience. The period’s contradictions—technological optimism amid political scandals, class unrest, and nationalist tensions—frame the book’s insistence on inner life, privacy, and the fragile autonomy of art.
The Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the Paris Commune (March–May 1871) set the stage for the Third Republic and haunted French cultural life into the 1890s. France’s defeat at Sedan (1 September 1870) and the Siege of Paris culminated in the Commune’s uprising and its bloody suppression during the “Semaine sanglante” in late May. The trauma—military humiliation, civil war in the capital, mass executions, and exile—left deep scars on a generation of writers and readers. Symons’s subjects include figures who lived through these upheavals; his portraits acknowledge a France shaped by loss, political distrust, and a retreat from grand public rhetoric toward private, often nocturnal, urban milieus.
No single political drama more fully illuminates the 1890s than the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), which exposed anti-Semitism, state secrecy, and the volatility of the press. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was arrested in Paris in October 1894 for treason on flimsy evidence, convicted in a closed court-martial, and sent to Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Subsequent revelations—particularly the 1896 findings of Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart identifying Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy as the likely culprit—collided with military intransigence. Émile Zola’s open letter “J’Accuse…!” (13 January 1898), published in L’Aurore, catalyzed a national split between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards. Street demonstrations, press trials, and ministerial crises followed, as did a turbulent retrial at Rennes in August–September 1899; Dreyfus received a pardon that year and full exoneration and reinstatement in 1906. The Affair intersected with Parisian sociability: salons and cafés debated justice, race, and the authority of institutions, while the “lois scélérates” climate of the mid-1890s sharpened anxieties around speech and publication. Symons encountered French writers amid this crucible; several figures he studied inhabited circles (such as Mallarmé’s Tuesday evenings on the rue de Rome) where the cultural meaning of truth and language was discussed against the backdrop of the Affair. Although the book is not a political treatise, its emphasis on the private, suggestive, and oblique can be read as an aesthetic counter to a public sphere saturated by propaganda, rumor, and forensic detail. In presenting French authors to an English readership during and after Dreyfus, Symons tacitly maps a Europe where conscience, minority rights, and the responsibilities of print culture were fiercely contested.
The 1890s in France also witnessed anarchist violence and state repression. Auguste Vaillant’s bomb in the Chamber of Deputies (9 December 1893), Émile Henry’s Café Terminus attack (12 February 1894), and the assassination of President Sadi Carnot in Lyon by Sante Geronimo Caserio (24 June 1894) triggered the “lois scélérates” (1893–1894), which broadened criminal liability for advocacy and tightened controls on the press and associations. Police surveillance extended into cafés, cabarets, and small journals. Symons’s reliance on intimate settings—salons, little magazines, private conversations—signals how writers adapted to a climate where public speech could be perilous, and how suggestive modes of expression thrived when direct political language drew suspicion.
In Britain, the Oscar Wilde trials (April–May 1895) crystallized legal and moral anxieties. Using Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (the Labouchere Amendment, 1885), prosecutors secured Wilde’s conviction for “gross indecency” on 25 May 1895. The scandal contaminated the avant-garde: the public associated the “yellow” of decadent literature with notoriety; Aubrey Beardsley was dismissed from The Yellow Book. In response, Leonard Smithers launched The Savoy (1896), which Arthur Symons edited, as a haven for independent art and criticism. Symons’s book, appearing soon after, implicitly defends artistic privacy and cosmopolitan exchange at a moment when English cultural life was chilled by prosecutions, prudery, and press vigilantism.
The era’s technological spectacles reset expectations of modern life. Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889, which inaugurated the Eiffel Tower and drew over 30 million visitors, and the 1900 Exposition, with electric illumination, moving sidewalks, and the opening of the first Paris Métro line (Line 1, 1900), showcased confidence in industry and empire. These fairs reorganized the city’s flows of crowds, commodities, and images. Symons’s portrait of writers inhabiting boulevards, arcades, and cafés engages a social reality of acceleration and display. By emphasizing inwardness and the nocturnal city, the book counters the fairground logic of spectacle, framing artistic labor as a response to the alienations of mass tourism and mechanized rhythm.
Across the Channel, imperial and national questions pressed. The failed Irish Home Rule Bills (1886, 1893) and the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893 channeled cultural energies into political self-assertion, while debates over the Boer War (1899–1902)—from the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking to domestic anti-war protests led by critics like J. A. Hobson—divided British opinion on militarism and empire. Symons’s friendships with Irish contemporaries and his cosmopolitan orientation placed him near conversations about cultural sovereignty and the ethics of power. The book’s attention to marginal, often nonconformist voices can be read as sympathetic to minority national aspirations and wary of uniform imperial narratives.
Symons’s study functions as a social and political critique by foregrounding the pressures that late nineteenth-century states and markets placed on the individual imagination. Against anti-Semitic mobilization, emergency laws, and moral crusades, the book insists on privacy, ambiguity, and conscience as civic goods. Its portrait of urban life exposes the commodification of culture—journalistic sensationalism, spectacle, and the policing of desire—while registering classed geographies of cafés, salons, and streets. By tracing how artists sought shelter from propaganda, prosecution, and patriotic bombast, Symons implicitly indicts legal overreach, moral hypocrisy, and imperial hubris, proposing inward freedom and cosmopolitan exchange as antidotes to the era’s coercive certainties.
