From the Golden Fly to the Wounded Lion, over 40 animal tales of decadence, mystery, and the uncanny.

An original, sumptuously illustrated collection of fin-de siècle animal stories and poems, selected, translated, and introduced by Jessica Gossling and Sam Kunkel. Bringing together works by forty writers including Michael Field, Remy de Gourmont, Lafcadio Hearn, J.-K. Huysmans, Rachilde, and Eric Count Stenbock, this timely anthology explores the inexorable connection between human and animal, from the lion to the ant.

Bringing together tales both familiar and largely unknown, some of them translated into English for the first time, The Decadent Bestiary opens a new chapter in the complex story of our relationship with the natural world, showcasing the beasts of beauty and burden that recur in decadent and symbolist writing.

Featuring stories and poems from Victor Hugo, Renée Vivien, Aleister Crowley, Iwan Gilkin, Guy de Maupassant, H. P. Lovecraft, Charles Baudelaire, Stanislas de Guaïta, Saki, Hector Chainaye, Jules Renard, Olive Custance, Gustave Kahn, Maurice Maeterlinck, William Sharp, Oscar Wilde, Catulle Mendès, D. G. Rossetti, Max Beerbohm, Eric Stenbock, Rosamund Marriott Watson, Remy de Gourmont, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Stéphane Mallarmé, W. B. Yeats, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jules Laforgue, John Todhunter, Michael Field, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Rachilde, Jules Renard, E. F. Benson, Emily Pfeiffer, Olive Schreiner, Algernon Blackwood, John Byrne Leicester Warren, Marcel Schwob, Lafcadio Hearn,  Léon Bloy.

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About the editors
Sam Kunkel is a French translator and scholar of nineteenth-century religious literature. He has translated and introduced Echoes of a Natural World by Gustave Kahn (2020) and A Beam of Sunlight in the Deep Forest: Mystical Prose Works of Édouard Schuré (2021).

Jessica Gossling is Lecturer in English and teaches Victorian literature, decadence, modernism, poetry, and literary theory. Her research is primarily focused on French and English literary decadence, spatial theory, and occulture. She is a member of the Decadence Research Centre and she completed her PhD on Decadent Threshold Poetics in 2018.