Neither short nor sharp nor shocking
To be fair to him, George C. Schoolfield, of Yale University, does admit in his opening sentence that ‘movement’ may be too strong a word to describe the collection of writers on whom his Baedeker focuses. So, I think, may ‘fashion’. Links between authors in these 23 cross-global chapters are certainly thin — here an admiring letter, there a nabbed theme — and with some it is hard to see any link other than date and drivel. Each country has a chapter, and for that chapter they are allowed usually no more than one representative entry. Thus we get chapters on the decadent movement of Wales (entry: Arthur Machen) as well as that of Australia (Henry Handel Richardson). Other entries are justified: Huysmans is here, as are Strindberg and Rilke.