Jonathan Stone is Associate Professor of Russian and has served as Chair of Comparative Literary Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, USA. He studies early Russian modernism, European Decadence, and the print and material culture of the fin de siècle. He is the author of The Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature (2013) and The Institutions of Russian Modernism: Conceptualizing, Publishing, and Reading Symbolism (2017).

1. Introduction: Visible and Invisible Modernity.- 2. Decadent Style with a Symbolist Worldview: Palimpsest, Mise en abyme, and the Perils of Profound Superficiality.- 3. Decadent Metaphysics.- 4. The Danger of Seeing Too Much: Fin-de-siècle Ethics and Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's Salome.- 5. Meaningfulness and Superficiality: Joseph Conrad's Surface Truths.- 6. When Metaphor Throttles Metonymy: The Perils of Misreading in Georges Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte.- 7. Conclusion: Fin-de-siècle Endings and Beginnings.