à reboursadv.

1895 Atlantic Monthly Aug. 264/2 Mr. Ruskin, who was always protesting against it [sc. the Renaissance], felt it, so to speak, à rebours, for he is to be fully understood only in connection with the so-called Oxford Movement, the revival of mediæval religion among cultivated people, which led them to Gothic art, and made them feel an instinctive antagonism toward the Renaissance.

1906 W. James Let. 3 Apr. in R. B. Perry Thought & Char. W. James (1935) II. 393 How lamely I, for one, must have expressed myself to be taken so à rebours.

1939 T. S. Eliot Idea Christian Society i. 19 It [sc. a dislike of everything maintained by Germany or Russia] may..lead us to be mere imitators à rebours, in making us adopt uncritically almost any attitude which a foreign nation rejects.

1949 I. Deutscher Stalin iv. 96 In making a fetish of the underground, in shying away from the broader opportunities for action, they tended to reduce the resolution to impotence. They were liquidators à rebours.

1951 M. Lowry Let. 25 Aug. (1967) 262 While he took no human action at all..some principle of tyrannic yet thwarted force in his feeling has worked against him, à rebours: now he does take action..mysteriously the thing begins to work for him.

2005 Times Lit. Suppl. 18 Mar. 10/3 Sturgis says that the anomaly ‘suggested to Rothenstein that in his quest for the drab, he might be “affecting a kind of dandyism à rebours”, trumping—as it were—the aspirations to conventional dandyism of Beardsley, Beerbohm, and Rothenstein himself’.