The Decadent Bestiary

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

An original collection of animal stories and poems from fin-de-siècle England and France, 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.

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.