First published in 1899 and subsequently out of print for over 50 years, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism, introducing the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. This new critical edition includes an introduction, chronology, notes and illuminating appendices.

First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism and introduced the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Arthur Symons's interest in writers such as Verlaine and Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature, but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as James Joyce, George Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for more than 50 years. It includes an introduction, chronology, and notes, together with appendices presenting the full text of Symons' essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature" and a selection of his translations of French poetry.