The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy by De Nerval, Gerard

The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780980033069)

Vendor: Gérard de Nerval
Product type: Books
Format: Paperback
$16.00
$16.00
$16.00
Subtotal: $16.00
The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy by De Nerval, Gerard

The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy

$16.00
The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy by De Nerval, Gerard

The Salt Smugglers: History of the Abbe de Bucquoy

$16.00
Format: Paperback
Description
Description
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First published as a feuilleton in a left-wing newspaper in 1850, The Salt Smugglers provides a political satire of the waning days of France's short-lived Second Republic. With nods to Diderot and Sterne, this shaggy-dog story deals less with contraband salt smugglers than with the subversive power of fiction to transgress legal and esthetic boundaries. By writing what he claimed was a purely documentary account of his picaresque adventures in search of an elusive book recording the true history of a certain seventeenth-century swashbuckler, Nerval sought to deride the press censors of the day who forbade the serial publication of novels in newspapers - and in the process he provocatively deconstructed existing distinctions between fact and fiction. Never before translated into English and still unavailable as a separately published volume in French, The Salt Smugglers is a pre-postmodern gem of experimental prose. Richard Sieburth's vibrant translation and illuminating afterword remind us why G rard de Nerval's blend of sly irony and acerbic social criticism proved so inspiring to authors as various as Baudelaire, Proust, and Leiris.

Author: Gérard de Nerval
ISBN-10: 0980033063
ISBN-13: 9780980033069
Publisher: Archipelago Books
Language: English
Published: 09/01/2009
Pages: 147
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 6.60h x 7.90w x 0.50d
By Gérard de Nerval
By Gérard de Nerval
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Poet, storyteller, autobiographer, translator, and visionary, Gérard de Nerval (1808-55) explored the blurry boundaries between dream and reality, fact and fiction, imagination and madness in his groundbreaking writings. Nerval was a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists, and a vital influence on writers such as Marcel Proust, André Breton, and Antonin Artaud. His works include Voyage en Orient ( Journey to the Orient), Sylvie - which Umberto Eco deemed a "masterpiece," Les Filles du Feu (The Daughters of Fire), Les Illuminés (The Illuminati), and Aurélia - which opens with "Dream is a second life." Richard Sieburth's translations include Gérard de Nerval's Selected Writings, Friedrich Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments, Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary, Henri Michaux's Emergences/ Resurgences and Stroke by Stroke, Gérard de Nerval's The Salt Smugglers, Michel Leiris' Nights as Day, Days as Night, and Gershom Scholem's The Fullness of Time: Poems. His edition of Nerval's Selected Writings won the 2000 PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. His recent translation of Maurice Scève's Délie was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize and the Weidenfeld Prize.

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