Dedalus

status of poets such as Mallarmé, Verlaine and Baudelaire, and artists such as Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau – all of whom were seen as marginal cultural figures at the time the novel was published – would be very different today if Against Nature had never been written.

Against Nature gave form and substance to a certain nebulous spirit of the times which up until then had remained undefined.

book had next to no plot, a single, unpleasant – if not downright immoral – leading character who was neurotic, self-obsessed and, what was worse, an effete aristocrat.