Nietzsche’s writings belong to a hybrid genre that pertains as much to literature as to philosophy. The first wave of French Nietzscheanism, dating from the 1890s to the First World War, occurred primarily in the field of literature. By contrast, in the eyes the philosophers who held sway in the university system, Nietzsche was considered too much of a poet and brilliant essayist to be a serious philosopher. A further explanation for the seductive power Nietzsche exercised on French writers is that he himself had a predilection for writers and thinkers in the tradition of Montaigne and Pascal over the French moralists, including his most immediate contemporary in France, Hippolyte Taine. Nevertheless, the reception of Nietzsche among French writers was selective and critical. André Gide saw in Nietzsche a fellow immoralist, but he kept a distance from Nietzsche the philosopher. Paul Valéry was happy to acknowledge the pleasure that reading Nietzsche’s prose gave him, but he was a harsh judge of what he deemed Nietzsche’s disregard for conceptual precision. Marcel Proust treated Nietzscheanism as a social phenomenon in À la recherche du temps perdu, sprinkling remarks about the author of The Case of Wagner across his characters while remaining himself a committed Wagnerian.

4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

This chapter discusses how literary heritage and authorial legacies are addressed, reflected on and performed in reconfigurations of Shakespeare. It reads the encounter of Beckett’s aesthetics with Shakespeare by way of Joyce’s use of language and his performative reworking of literary heritage. Interacting with Joyce, Beckett also found an early model of how to engage with literary history in a way that is both creative and destructive. The chapter focuses on the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode of Ulysses, which inquires into notions of authorship, national heritage and identity. With regard to Shakespeare, and particularly Hamlet, the chapter records various received paradigms of literary lineage and reception. The second part of this chapter traces Beckett’s inversions of Joycean and Shakespearean paradigms. Shakespeare becomes part of the creative matrix of Beckett’s works where the very richness of his material emerges in his use of minute details and his attention to the mole-cular level of languages and ideas that form the minimal components of his work.

Along with the destinations Bishop traveled to and lived in for a time – Key West, New York, Brazil, Mexico – Paris holds a key place. Her extended periods of time there where she studied the French language, met fellow artists, and immersed herself in the culture, became a wellspring for her poetic development. While it is her earlier poems where she incorporates her experience of Paris most directly, even later work reflects her continuous interest in those French poets whom she most admired. Bishop frequently refers to those writers: Baudelaire, especially, and the symbolists and surrealists who follow him. Bishop did not adhere to any one poetic school; however, her poems and stories reflect her engagement with many traditions, including her reading of modern French poetry and poetics. This chapter traces Bishop’s relationship to Paris and French poetry, biographically and aesthetically, focusing on the city’s impact on her work.

The chapter provides an overview of literary predecessors whose influence is evident across Mailer’s work, but perhaps most notably in his early work: John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Theodore Dreiser, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, and Leo Tolstoy, among others.

Chapter 3 discusses other sides of narrative properties, taking as examples and models a number of writers from Bethlehem to Havana, to demonstrate two sides of engagement with the Nights: its role in consolidating predispositions to the art of narrative, as in the case of the Palestinian-Iraqi novelist, critic, poet, and painter Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and also its generous loans to writers across the globe. A narrative globe-trotter of a sort, Scheherazade of the Nights is an ever welcome guest and host in almost every culture. If she gives the French novelist Michel Butor a second mendicant of multiple adventures and transformations that converse with his experimentation in new fiction, it is Proust’s self-reference for an unfinished narrative journey. Barth reads its frame tale as a dialectic between sex and narrative. The Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Najīb Maḥfūẓ presents the cosmopolitan female narrator as an adept who cannot dispense, however, with her Sufi master’s guidance to see behind the thick material barriers of arrogance, passion, vicissitudes, wide challenges, and the need to combat evil. Scheherazade is the trope for the confabulator nocturni.

The second chapter explores in more detail the Buddhist concepts relayed by Schopenhauer cycling through Western culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Focusing on the Beckett of the 1930s and writers and artists with whom he was conversant, the chapter chronicles what their works owe to the Buddha and Schopenhauer’s teachings. Subsequent sections probe the analogies that are evident for Schopenhauer between Eastern and Western mysticism – the Buddha and Meister Eckhart’s teachings in particular – resulting in Beckett’s allusions throughout his oeuvre, over six decades, to both Buddhist and Christian Neoplatonic thought. The Buddha and Schopenhauer’s two-world view of the empirical and the metaphysical serves to interrogate nihilistic interpretations of the Buddhist absolute and to focus closely on Schopenhauer’s rescue of nirvāṇa from such misreadings. A short disquisition on the unknowable and silence, values Beckett shared with Eastern and Western thinkers, concludes this chapter.

This chapter follows on from the last to trace the development of the prosthetic modernism discernible at the turn of the twentieth century, as it works through the modernist novel from Proust, Joyce, Stein and Woolf up to the extended late modernist work of Samuel Beckett. The chapter reads Beckett’s reception of Proustian and Joycean modernism, from his novels of the thirties and forties up to his late work Company and suggests that this reception might best be understood as a poetics of twining. Beckett offers an extended reflection on the ways in which the modernist novel performs a mode of twining, a joining together of mind with prosthetic extension; but he also enacts a specific form of untwining, which demonstrates how the novel has always shown the unbound, the disaggregated, to be a constituent part of the terms in which it conducts its binding properties.

The centrality of decadence to the development of modernism is clear in the work of the major modernist figures James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann. Joyce expatiates on decadent traits with such encyclopaedic abandon in the ‘Circe’ chapter of Ulysses that they finally evince something absurd and mysterious in human nature, whereas in In Search of Lost Time Proust more tightly aligns decadent traits with the burden of personal character and societal malaise. Mann, in underscoring both medical and metaphysical aspects of decadence, links with Joyce and Proust at many points. These prominent modernists reflect awareness of two basic polarities that first emerged in the decadent era of the fin de siècle: on the one side, concern over disintegrative forces in the modern world and realization of the need to take spiritual and aesthetic shelter; and, on the other, a sense of the aesthetic imperative to harvest the gains which the opportunity of such a moment presented.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.