"In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility –..."
- Asti Hustvedt
"The photograph, then, becomes a representation of a representation of a disease that represents. In other words, in order to produce the most perfect images of hysteria, the hysteric – a woman whose i..."
"Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticiz..."
"The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual l..."
"Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, myst..."
"The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse."
"By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction."