Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence (European Cultural Transition, 13)

In this title, the author argues that in the pages of Symbolist journals the modern reader can unearth an "other" 19th century, revealed as a creative realm in which writers allow themselves more artistic freedom than in their more formal, literary creations. In the journal they tested experimental theories, composed offbeat poetic texts and offered their opinions on a vast array of cultural phenomena. The aim of the book is to show that the Symbolist journals bear witness to a more personal, erratic, and innovative face of an aesthetic movement and a historical moment that have in many ways become cliched. The author also suggests that the development of interdisciplinarity in the Symbolist journals represents an influential aesthetic notion that went on to play a crucial role in 20th-century artistic expression, discernible in the schools of Modernism and Surrealism.