Selected Writings

The most inclusive and comprehensive selection of Nerval's brilliant poems, memoirs, fictions, and essays ever to appear in English. Charles Baudelaire regarded Nerval as the most lucid poet of the age, and Marcel Proust ranked him as one of its greatest prose writers. Andre Breton claimed Nerval as the precursor of Surrealism, and Antonin Artaud placed him in the same visionary company as Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh. This selection of writings 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 doppelgnger 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. This volume will confirm Nerval's major place in literary history as much more than the amiable eccentric who walked live lobsters on blue ribbons through the streets of Paris.