Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gérard 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 'Aurélia', 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, André Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.

Selected WritingsIntroduction
Chronology
Further Reading
Shadow Selves
Introductory Note
The King of Bedlam
The Tale of Caliph Hakim

Memories of the Valois
Introductory Note
Angélique
Sylvie

Unreal Cities
Introductory Note
Diorama
To My Friend Théophile Gautier
Octavia
October Nights
Pandora

Dream/Life
Introductory Note
Aurélia
Drafts of "Aurélia"
Panorama
Letters

Sonnets
Introductory Note
The Gramont Manuscript
The Chimeras

Notes

Gerard de Nerval was born Gerard Labrunie in 1808, in Paris, the son of an army doctor. A precocious poet, he published a number of volumes of political verse during his adolescence and gained fame at the age of nineteen for his translation of Goethe's Faust. He was one of the young Romantics gathered around Victor Hugo, and served for a long time as a ghost-writer of Alexandre Dumas. Between 1852 and 1855, in a state of ever-mounting financial and mental disarray, Nerval published the bulk of the work on which his fame rests: The Illuminati, October Nights, Castles in Bohemia, The Daughters of Fire, Sylvie, The Chimeras, and Aurelia. Nerval died on 26 January 1855, by his own hand.