SELECTED WRITINGS PB – GERARD DE NERVAL-RICHARD SIEBURTH-RICHARD SIEBURTH-RICHARD SIEBURTH

"Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings. This comprehensive selection of his works includes Aurelia , 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, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris."