ROBERT ZIEGLER is professor of Liberal Studies at Montana Tech, USA. He has published widely on turn-of-the century French literature and French Decadence, and is the author of four books on the fin de siècle: Beauty Raises the Dead (2001), selected as a Choice outstanding academic book, The Mirror of Divinity: The World and Creation in J.-K. Huysmans (2004), The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (2007), and Asymptote: An Approach to Decadent Fiction (2009).