Selected Writings (Paperback, Reissue)

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.