Selected Writings

By Gérard de Nerval

Book Overview

This selection of writings-the first such comprehensive gathering to appear in English-provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, belle-lettrist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to "Aur?lia", the memoir of his madness, "Sylvie" (considered a 'masterpiece' by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of "The Chimeras", this volume includes Nerval's Doppelg?nger 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. Selected Writings confirms Nerval's place as a precursor of the French Symbolists and as a vital model for such twentieth-century writers as Marcel Proust, Andr? Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Leiris.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0472061631
• ISBN13: 9780472061631
• Release Date: January 1970
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 250 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.