À rebours (; translated
Against Nature or
Against the Grain) (
1884) is a
novel by the French writer
Joris-Karl Huysmans. Its narrative concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the
tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive
aesthete and
antihero who loathes 19th-century
bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation.
À rebours contains many themes that became associated with the
Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from
Naturalism and became the ultimate example of "
decadent" literature.