Selected Writings by Gerard de Nerval

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About Gerard de Nerval

Biography

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Selected Writings

» Gerard de Nerval

Translator - Richard Sieburth

Penguin Classics
Paperback : 28 Jan 1999

£14.99

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PEN BOMC Translation Prize : --Select a value--

Synopsis

Gérard 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, belle-lettrist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to 'Aurélia', the memoir of his madness, 'Sylvie' (considered a 'masterpiece' by Proust), and the hermetic sonnets of The Chimeras, this volume includes Nerval's Doppelgänger 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, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Leiris.

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Critic Review:

'For a long time now, poetry has been thought of as a distant land, and poetry in translation seems to legitimize even further our unwillingness to take the trip. Richard Siedburth's recent annotated translation of Gérard de Nerval's Selected Writings makes the journey worthwhile' Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, Lingua Franca