Edouard Dujardin is most often remembered as the author of Les Lauriers sont coupés (1888; translated as We'll to the Woods No More, 1938), a short novel that went virtually unnoticed until more than twenty-five years after its publication, when James Joyce told friends that its use of interior monologue had given him the idea for his own stream-of-consciousness technique. In spite of its original style, the work has aroused surprisingly little interest, and Dujardin's other works have fallen into almost total obscurity. And yet during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, he was widely recognized as one of the central figures of the symbolist movement. He experimented more or less successfully with every conceivable genre. He wrote two novels, a collection of short stories, eight plays, and three prose poems. He was among the first French poets to write vers libre. He founded the celebrated...