In des Esseintes's aborted journey to Dickens's London, Huysmans's À rebours offers a snapshot of a burgeoning tradition of later nineteenthcentury writing which develops the idea of an aesthetics of space. Building upon and responding critically to a certain ‘realist’ literary tradition, this aesthetics of space attempts to find new ways to speak about how space is experienced by the nineteenth-century subject, and how such experiences are always already ‘aesthetic’ ones. It focuses on the potential of ‘aesthetic effects’, ones which act on the body, and which alter how that body engages with the spaces which it navigates. What is at stake for this new tradition is not simply an aesthetic response to space, but an aesthetic approach to it; not simply an aesthetic appreciation of space, but an adopting of aesthetic intentions towards it. Moreover, in this tradition, space is approached through its prior aesthetic representations, so that any aesthetics of space constitutes an intricate textual sensorium. In such a tradition, the idea of ‘making sense of the text and experiencing it with one's senses’ becomes blurred, as Kostas Boyiopoulos puts it in his study of fin-de-siècle Anglophone symbolist poetry (2015: 1). While this book is primarily interested in writers of prose rather than poetry, it maintains a similar interest in the sensuous and material aspects of the aesthetic. More specifically, it focuses not only on the way in which space affects the subject, but also on how this tradition represents these sensory experiences to the reader. Such an emphasis on the sensual makes these figures forerunners of the impressionist and modernist approaches to space. It is this tradition of the aesthetic literary treatment of space, one that passes from Ruskin, through Dickens, Pater, Wilde and James and on to modernism, which this book will begin to unpack, as a set of sketches towards a tradition.

After Realism

As we have seen, Huysmans is writing ‘after Dickens’ in À rebours, in an incident that plays around with various different ideas of what to write after Dickens means. One of the most obvious ways to understand the idea is to take it as a challenge or response to realism.