Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction offers a radically new approach to the psychology of Decadent creation. Rejecting traditional arguments that Decadence is a celebration of deviance and exhaustion, this study presents the fin-de-siecle novel as a transformative process, a quest for health. By allowing the writer to project into fiction unwanted traits and destructive tendencies - by permitting the playful invention of provisional identities -, Decadent creation itself becomes a dynamic act of creative regeneration. In describing the interrelationship of Decadent authors and their fictions, Asymptote uses the mathematical figure of the asymptote to show how they converge, then split apart, and grow distant. The author"s approach to the facsimile selves he plays with and discards is the curve that never merges with his authorial identity. In successive chapters, this study describes the Decadents" experimentation with perversion (Huysmans"s A rebours and Mendes"s Zo"har), and...