It is now widely recognised that Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) was a great deal more than the literary hooligan responsible for staging Ubu Roi. A growing number of readers in recent decades have discovered and explored the highly varied delights of his work, which includes proto-absurdist theatre, comic libretti, engagingly facetious journalism, and a prose style frequently tending towards an incomprehensibility which, depending on the reader, either blurs or enhances the effect of Jarry's distinctive confrontations with emotional, metaphysical and artistic truths. His work appeals to many – and can discourage others – by virtue of its unusual integration of an infectious sense of humour with an ambitious approach to the profundities of the universe, a combination which unnerved his contemporaries and is still something of an acquired taste.

There is no denying that, as an author, Jarry is different; certainly it was this quality that first attracted me to his work. It is understandable that writing on Jarry has tended to concentrate on his status as a literary and personal individualist. As the Jarry cult has grown, many of his contemporaries, both major and minor, have slipped into obscurity, and for some it is now Jarry who stands as one of the pre-eminent authors of the Parisian avant-garde at the turn of the century. Conveniently, he fits the Bohemian model of the starving eccentric extrovert that has become almost a stereotype of the period. Whatever the poetic justice in the status Jarry now enjoys, it gives a distorted view, and can only contribute to the strange lack of reading and understanding in modern study of his period. The Belle Epoque is only a century behind us, and is widely regarded as one of the great flowerings of French culture. Yet its literature has relatively few dedicated followers; many of the most distinctive and curious works of the period are long out of print, though it is often through these works that we can develop a fuller understanding of the creative literature of the time.

This study is an attempt to redress the balance, to reconstitute partial readings of Belle Epoque literature that would make sense to Jarry and his contemporaries, and which are based to a significant extent on period assessments of period texts.