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- Clarimonde
- and Other
Stories
- by
- Théophile
Gautier
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Introduction
by Brian Stableford
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- If you appreciate supernatural French Decadence,
then you need look no further than Clarimonde
and Other Stories
by Théophile Gautier. A pioneer of the genre, Gautier (1811-1872)
garnered his initial enthusiasm for supernatural literature from the
stories of E.TA. Hoffman, adding an erotic effusiveness all his own.
Gautier’s trail-blazing manifesto for Romanticism was taken up by
numerous other writers, most notably by Charles Baudelaire, who in 1857
dedicated Les
Fleurs du mal to him.
The twelve stories in this
volume repre-sent the best of Gautier’s fantastic tales and deal with a
wide range of supernatural phenomena, including identity exchange (in
‘Avatar’), vampirism, time travel, the evil eye, and the decadence of
ancient Egypt (in ‘One of Cleopatra’s Nights’). Most of the translations
are by the Irish-American writer Lafcadio Hearn, and retain the ardent
extravagance of Gautier’s original French style.
As Brian Stableford says in his new
Introduction, ‘Gautier remains . . . a key writer in the evolution of
fantastic fiction from its Gothic roots to its psychological
sophistication, whose importance in the middle part of the nineteenth
century . . . deserves to be ranked second [only to
Poe].’
Clarimonde and Other
Stories contains: ‘Introduction’ by Brian Stableford,
‘Onuphrius’, ‘Two Actors for One Part’, ‘Omphale’, ‘Clarimonde’, ‘One of
Cleopatra’s Nights’, ‘The Opium Pipe’, ‘The Duplicated Knight’, ‘The
Mummy’s Foot’, ‘King Candaules’, ‘Arria Marcella’, ‘Jettatura’,
‘Avatar’, and various addenda.
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- Clarimonde and Other
Stories is a sewn hardback of 366+xiii pages, printed
lithographically, with head and tailbands, and d/w.
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- Limited to 300 copies.
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- Publication 21st October 2011
- ISBN
978-1-905784-38-7
- Price £35/$60 inc. p&p.
Review:
"Read this for the prose style alone, which, for
anyone who has read his one anthologised story ‘Loving Lady Death’ (‘La
Morte Amoureuse’) - re-translated as the title tale here - will already
have experienced his stunning, sensual evocation of place and time. This
continues in the other eleven tales." - The Pan
Review
Page updated 9th November 2011
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