At the end of the 19th century, two important developments, which both effect fin de siecle literature, unsettle the European subject: the loss of historical and metaphysical security on the one hand and a profound crisis of perception on the other. Jan Rohden examines the effects of both developments on the European subject’s solution approaches for finding historical and metaphysical meaning. In his analysis of selected texts of Huysmans’, D'Annunzio’s, Hofmannsthal’s and Wilde’s, he identifies a similar attempt of all the four authors to compensate for the lack of historical and metaphysical meaning, which is based on a specific form of perception.