Rachilde was the pseudonym of Marguerite Eymery Vallette (1860-1953), a woman of powerful personality who made her place at the very center of the Symbolist movement in fin-de-siecle France. Though relatively unknown in America, Rachilde had a significant influence on the course of French and Western literature and theater. She was a pioneer of antirealistic drama and the first to use the term absurd to characterize the new kind of theater that would be "a pretext for a dream." Rachilde's sexual politics and sardonic humor make her plays more interesting - and more performable - today than many of those of her more famous contemporaries. Where male Symbolists were obsessed with death, Rachilde explores the fearful thrill of sexuality. Topical, challenging, and all but lost to contemporary audiences, her extraordinary work offers the shock of relevance and freshness of discovery.

Poisoned cigars, seductive apparitions, minds and empires in the last of their decline and the most notorious kiss in dramatic history – decadent plays challenged the moral as much as the dramatic imagination of their own day, and continue to probe horizons of taste and the possibilities of stagecraft. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers reacted to urban modernity by embracing decadent themes and styles, and dramatists were no exception. Decadence offered these writers a framework for exploring nonconformist identities and beliefs that challenged behavioural norms as much as the desirability of modern progress. Decadent plays were at once behind the times in their celebration of antiquity, and forward-thinking in their staging of themes that have become all the more timely in the 21st century, including queerness, unconventional eroticism, and critiques of empire and industrial progress. Equally, the diversity of decadent drama cannot be pigeon-holed; many of these plays still have the capacity to offend worldviews, and invite us to interrogate present-day conventions and propriety. International in scope and eclectic in content, this edited anthology is an authoritative and accessible introduction to a fast-expanding field of decadent literature. The first publication of its kind to deal with decadent drama, and featuring plays translated into English for the first time, Decadent Plays: 1890 to 1930 breaks new ground by foregrounding decadence as a dramatic sensibility in this most pivotal of periods in the history of modern drama. Featuring canonical and little-known works by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Lesya Ukrainka, Rachilde, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Leonid Andreyev, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Maurice Maeterlinck, Izumi Kyoka, and Djuna Barnes, this anthology is an essential introduction to decadent drama that will pique the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Under the assumed name Rachilde, Marguerite Eymery (1860?1953) wrote over sixty works of fiction, drama, poetry, memoir, and criticism, including Monsieur Vänus, one of the most famous examples of decadent fiction. She was closely associated with the literary journal Mercure de France, inspired parts of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and mingled with all the literary lights of the day. Yet for all that, very little has been written about her. Melanie C. Hawthorne corrects this oversight and counters the traditional approach to Rachilde by persuasively portraying this "eccentric" as patently representative of the French women writers of her time and of the social and literary issues they faced. Seen in this light, Rachilde's writing clearly illustrates important questions in feminist literary theory as well as significant features of turn-of-the-century French society. ø Hawthorne arranges her approach to Rachilde around several defining events in the author's life, including the controversial publication of Monsieur Vänus, with its presentation of sex reversals. Weaving back and forth in time, she is able to depict these moments in relation to Rachilde's life, work, and times and to illuminate nineteenth-century publishing practices and rivalries, including authorial manipulations of the market for sexually suggestive literature. The most complete and accurate account yet written of this emblematic author, Hawthorne's work is also the first to situate Rachilde in the broader social contexts and literary currents of her time and of our own.

In Fashioning Spaces, Heidi Brevik-Zender argues that in the years between 1870 and 1900 the chroniclers of Parisian modernity depicted the urban landscape not just in public settings such as boulevards and parks but also in “dislocations,” spaces where the public and the intimate overlapped in provocative and subversive ways. Stairwells, theatre foyers, dressmakers' studios, and dressing rooms were in-between places that have long been overlooked but were actually marked as indisputably modern through their connections with high fashion. Fashioning Spaces engages with and thinks beyond the work of critics Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to arrive at new readings of the French capital. Examining literature by Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, and others, as well as paintings, architecture, and the fashionable garments worn by both men and women, Brevik-Zender crafts a compelling and innovative account of how fashion was appropriated as a way of writing about the complexities of modernity in fin-de-siècle Paris.

In Staging Politics and Gender , Cecilia Beach examines the political and feminist plays of French playwrights who have largely been overlooked until now. Beach highlights the importance of theatrical endeavors which women perceived as a powerful way to promote political opinions. The author analyzes the work of Louise Michel, Nelly Roussel, Marie Leneru, Vera Starkoff, and Madeline Pelletier and discusses anarchist theatre and forms of social protest theatre at the turn of the century.

“This thoughtful academic treatise . . . explores the lives of three famous gender nonconformists in fin-de-siècle Paris.” —Publishers Weekly Before the term “transgender” existed, there were those who experienced their gender in complex ways. Before Trans examines the lives and writings of Jane Dieulafoy (1850–1916), Rachilde (1860–1953), and Marc de Montifaud (1845–1912), three French writers whose gender expression did not conform to nineteenth-century notions of femininity. Dieulafoy fought alongside her husband in the Franco-Prussian War; later she wrote novels about girls becoming boys and enjoyed being photographed in her signature men's suits. Rachilde became famous in the 1880s for her controversial gender-bending novel Monsieur Vénus, published around the same time that she started using a calling card that read “Rachilde, Man of Letters.” Montifaud turned to erotic writings, for which she was repeatedly charged with "offense to public decency"; she wore tailored men's suits and a short haircut and went by masculine pronouns among certain friends. Dieulafoy, Rachilde, and Montifaud established themselves as fixtures in the literary world of fin-de-siècle Paris at the same time as French writers, scientists, and doctors were becoming fascinated with sexuality and sexual difference. Even so, the concept of gender identity as separate from sexual identity did not yet exist. Before Trans explores these three figures' efforts to articulate a sense of selfhood that did not align with the conventional gender roles of their day. Their personal stories provide vital historical context for our own efforts to understand the nature of gender identity. “A fresh and original take on trans history.” —Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure