This selection of writings - the first such comprehensive gatherings to appear in English - provides an overview of Nerval's work as a poet, bellerist, short-story writer and autobiographer. In addition to 'Aurelia', the memoir of his madness, 'Sylvie' and the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimera's', this volume includes Nerval's Doppelganger 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 puragatory of mental illness.
