SOURCE: "Laforgue's 'Salomé' and the Poetics of Parody," in The Romanic Review, Vol. LXXV, No. 1, January, 1984, pp. 51-69.

Hannoosh is the author of Parody and Decadence: Laforgue's "Moralités légendaires" (1989). In the following essay, she interprets the story "Salomé" as a self-reflexive parody of the Decadent movement by a Decadent author.

Mon volume de nouvelles, tu en connais le principe: de vieux canevas brodés d'âmes à la mode.

In these terms did Laforgue describe his only collection of stories, the Moralités légendaires, one of the two great products of his last years and one of the most ingenious prose creations of the late nineteenth century. The controlling principle that he identifies here—introducing a distinctly modern spirit into established stories of the literary tradition—had motivated him somewhat throughout his career, but never as extensively as in these late tales, where it becomes...