Selected writings
By: Gérard de Nerval ; translated and with an introduction and notes by Richard Sieburth.
Contributors: Sieburth, Richard.
Series: Penguin classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1999
Place of publication: London, England; New York, N.Y., USA
Language: eng; fre
Number of pages: 406
Description: "Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855), a contemporary of Poe, De Quincey, Gogol and Heine, introduced into French literature a mode of writing rooted in German romanticism yet already recognizably modernist in its explorations of the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction." "This selection of writings - the first such comprehensive gathering to appear in English - provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belletrist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to 'Aurelia', the memoir of his madness, 'Sylvie' (considered a 'masterpiece' by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras', this volume includes Nerval's Doppelganger tales and experimental fictions. Selections from his correspondence demonstrate a lucid awareness of the strategies by which nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his visionary imagination to the purgatory of mental illness."--Jacket.
Notes: Poems are given in original French, with prose English translation at bottom of page.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [xxxv]-xxxvi).