Selected Writings

Gerard De Nerval; Richard Sieburth
Penguin Publishing Group
 9780140446012
0-14-044601-X

Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Grard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking.

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writings. This comprehensive selection of his works includes 'Aurlia', the memoir of his madness; the haunting novella of love and memory 'Sylvie' (considered to be a masterpiece by Proust); the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras'; as well as Nerval's experimental fictions and selections from his correspondence, which demonstrate his lucid awareness of how nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his fertile imagination to the status of mental illness. Together these pieces confirm Nerval's place as a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists and a vital model for such writers as Marcel Proust, Andr Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.