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| Mad_Monk |
Part First: Of Regency Bucks, Primping Dandies and Feckless Fops; The European Decadent Movement; Near, Middle and Far Eastern Thought, Fantasy and Adventure; The American Gothic.
As society become more experimental and audacious, the themes turn to egoism, dark moods and fantasies. Much still remains illegal with savage retributions so allegory is to the fore. For those seeking sexual fantasy, many of the works will add subject matter and colour to your play rather than specific biological calisthenics. Much more arousing.
All original texts are out of copyright and can be downloaded for free but translations and 'restored' versions remain with the protection of the law. To spare you my rambling discourses, these descriptions are mostly picked from the publisher's catalogues specified.
Jacques D'Adelsward-Fersen — Lord Lyllian (1893)
Forced to flee Paris for Capri after a scandal that mirrored Wilde's, D'Adelsward Fersen made fictional his infamous Pink Masses and the ensuing witch-hunt in this bitingly satirical novel. (Publisher: Elysium Press)
Barbey D'Aurevilly - Les Diaboliques (1874) Tr. Ernest Boyd 1986
Six decadent stories that celebrate the seven deadly vices while showing no counterbalancing interests in the seven cardinal virtues. (Publisher: Dedalus)
Charles Baudelaire -The Flowers of Evil (1857)
... which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were put on trial for offence to public decency. Six offending poems were banned, in a conviction that was not overturned until 1949. Originally to be called 'The Lesbians', 'The Flowers of Evil' contains the most extraordinary body of love poetry. The poems also pose the question of the role of evil in our lives, of whether there are not external forces working to frustrate human plans and to enlist men and women on appalling or stultifying scenarios not of their own making. (Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks)
Baudelaire - Claude Pichois, Jean Ziegler (1989)
A remarkably detailed, eminently readable biography of the 19th-century poet/ debauchee/ rebel/ addict/ dandy, by the head of Vanderbilt University's Baudelaire Center. Drawing on the extensive research and scholarship conducted during the past century, Pichois offers one of the most rounded portraits of the enigmatic author ever attempted. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), led a life marked by disease, drugs, and depravity. He associated with many of the leading literary figures of the day-Hugo, Merimee, Sainte-Beuve - enchanting some with his talent, infuriating others with his outrageousness. Meanwhile, his relationships with women had been fleeting at best and are shrouded in mystery to this day. Syphilis finally resulted in his death at age 46. Pichois presents all of the material with a fine eye for the significant detail, leavening his narrative with colourful anecdotes. He analyses Baudelaire's oeuvre with equal care and insight. A definitive study. (Kirkus Reviews for Publisher, Vintage Lives)
Aubrey Beardsley — Under the Hill (1897)
The tragic life of Aubrey Beardsley (illustrator of 'The Yellow Book' and Oscar Wilde's 'Salome') was, in addition to his untimely death at age 25, further marred by censorship. The famed illustrator had compiled his erotic text, 'The Story of Venus and Tannhauser', into a couple of underground editions, but was only able to publish expurgated versions of the work in a magazine known as 'The Savoy after being dismissed from 'The Yellow Book'. Miles Underwood, author of The English Governess, has joined Beardsley's illustrations with the deceased author's unfinished manuscripts of the story. Adding in his own bits here and there, voila, we have 'Under the Hill', a kind of fairy tale for adults, featuring Tannhauser, a German hero of myth and Venus, goddess of love, plus some wild parties and sex without repercussion. (Publisher: Olympia Press)
J.F.Bloxam - The Priest and the Acolyte (1894)
This short story of a priest's carnal love with his altar boy was at one time credited to Wilde, who denied authorship, describing it as 'at moments poisonous, which is something'. (Publisher: The Lotus Press)
Camillo Boito - Senso (1882)
Decadent, macabre, demonic and depraved female heroines combined in a collection. They were an immediate and popular success in fin de siècle Italy. The title, “senso”, means “sense,” “feeling,” or “sentiment” and refers to the delight Livia experiences while reflecting on her affair with a handsome lieutenant. It includes Boito's most celebrated novella, 'A Corpse', the bizarre tale of rivalry between an artist and a student of anatomy for the beautiful body of Carlotta, the artist's dead mistress. (Publisher: Dedalus)
Élémir Bourges — Le Crépuscule des Dieux (The Twilight of the Gods) (1883)
A lurid novel that references Richard Wagner and the Elizabethan dramatists, in which the evil mistress of a French aristocrat encourages his three children to taste the fruits of their inherited degeneracy, leading to an orgy of incest, murder, suicide and traumatic insanity. (Publisher: Pirot)
Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMG FRGS
Traveller, Explorer, Translator and writer. Married Isabel Arundell (1831-96). Explored Somaliland (1854), the Nile (1856-9) and in North America in 1860. British Consul in Brazil (1864-9), Damascus (1869-71), Trieste (1872-5). On the night of his death Isabel burned 41 unpublished manuscripts and all his unpublished notes, hoping to preserve her husband's reputation. Fat chance. Here are his most famous translations:
The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) The “Poem of Sensual Pleasure” is one of the world's greatest books. Written between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, it is a magnificent treatise on sexual conduct and erotic technique. Its purpose is not simply to provide a menu for the sensual epicure or a training programme for the sexual athlete, but to comment on the situations in which men and women encounter, and to deal with them in such a way as to achieve personal fulfilment through ecstasy. (Publisher: Wordsworth Editions Ltd) Obtain an edition that is lusciously illustrated from the source.
The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886) “What can be more important, in fact, than the study of the principles upon which rest the happiness of man and woman, by reason of their mutual relations; relations which are themselves dependent upon character, health, temperament and the constitution, all of which it is the duty of philosophers to study} I have endeavoured to rectify this omission by notes, which, incomplete as I know them to be, will still serve for guidance. In doubtful and difficult cases, and where the ideas of the author did not seem to be clearly set out, I have not hesitated to look for enlightment to the savants of sundry confessions, and by their kind assistance many difficulties... But what makes this treatise unique as a book of its kind, is the seriousness with which the most lascivious and obscene matters are presented. It is evident that the author is convinced of the importance of his subject, and that the desire to be of use to his fellow-men is the sole motive of his efforts” - Sir Richard Francis Burton
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (or The Arabian Nights) (1885) Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king stories of adventure, love, riches and wonder – tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights. (Publisher: Penguin Classics) Obtain an edition that is lusciously illustrated from the source.
The Tangled Web - A life of Sir Richard Burton - Jon R Godsall (2008)
In this penetrating study of an exceptional man, Godsall has thrown a far wider net over Burton's life than previous biographers. Painstakingly researched and containing a wealth of new material never before used. (Publisher: Troubadour/ Matador)
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), Don Juan (1819) and others
“A wild striving to express a more inward and infinite sense characterises the works of every art. The music of Beethoven is said, by those who understand it, to labour with vaster conceptions and aspirations than music has attempted before. This feeling of the Infinite has deeply coloured the poetry of the period. This new love of the vast, always native in Germany, was imported into France by De Stael, appeared in England in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley... and finds a most genial climate in the American mind. Scott and Crabbe, who formed themselves on the past, had none of this tendency; their poetry is objective. In Byron, on the other hand, it predominates; but in Byron it is blind, it sees not its true end - an infinite good, alive and beautiful, a life nourished on absolute beatitudes, descending into Nature to behold itself reflected there. His will is perverted, he worships the accidents of society and his praise of Nature is thieving and selfish.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
'She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.' Kate Chopin was one of the most individual and adventurous of nineteenth-century american writers, whose fiction explored new and often startling territory. When her most famous story, The Awakening, was first published in 1899, it stunned readers with its frank portrayal of the inner word of Edna Pontellier, and its daring criticisms of the limits of marriage and motherhood. The subtle beauty of her writing was contrasted with her unwomanly and sordid subject-matter: Edna's rejection of her domestic role, and her passionate quest for spiritual, sexual, and artistic freedom. From her first stories, Chopin was interested in independent characters who challenged convention. (Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks)
Colette - Claudine à l'école (Claudine at School) (1900)/ Claudine à Paris (Claudine in Paris) (1901)/ Claudine en ménage (Claudine Married) (1902)/ Claudine s'en va (Claudine and Annie) (1903)
The books are semi-autobiographical and depict the life of a young girl (Claudine) through to adulthood. The first book shapes Claudine into a daring and at times naughty, at times mean, girl. A perfect start to a character that, as a reader, you grow to love for her sheer audacity. Tame by today's standards, in the context of early 20th Century Paris, they really are shocking. As Mme Claudine mixes with the Parisian socialites of the period, she merely is herself, shamelessly shunning the dictates of social propriety to gain the attentions of both men and women effortlessly. (Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux)
Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman (1999)
A superb literary biographer offers a satisfying life of the great French sensualist. “Like all those who never use their strength to the limit,” Colette wrote, “I am hostile to those who let life burn them out.” Fiercely disciplined, hugely productive, the author of “Gigi” and “Cheri” lived 80 years and produced nearly 80 volumes of fiction, memoirs, journalism and drama. She married three times, had male and female lovers and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died in 1954, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman. And she created the subtlest, most sustained literary examination of love and sex that we have. (Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing plc)
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness (1899)
Heart of Darkness, which appeared at the very beginning of the Twentieth century, remains it's most enduring and harrowing works of fiction. It “was a Cassandra cry announcing the end of Victorian Europe, on the verge of transforming itself into the Europe of violence”, wrote the critic Czeslaw Milosz. Written several years after Conrad's gruelling sojourn in the Belgian Congo, the novel tells the story of Marlow, a seaman who undertakes his own journey into the African jungle to find the tormented white trader Kurtz. Rich in irony and spellbinding prose, the novel is a complex meditation on colonialism, evil and the thin line between civilization and barbarity. This edition contains selections from Conrad's Congo Diary of 1890 - the first notes, in effect, for the novel which was composed at the end of that decade. Virginia Woolf wrote of Conrad, "His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash... He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life. With an Introduction by Caryl Phillips Commentary by H.L. Mencken, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Lionel Trilling, Chiua Achebe, and Philip Gourevitch (Publisher: Modern Library)
Jane Digby: A Scandalous Life - Mary S Lovell
Lady Jane Elizabeth Digby el Mezrab, 1807-1891, a celebrated beauty, was married at seventeen to Lord Ellenborough (later Viceroy of India). He was twice her age and within a few years she left him for an Austrian prince resulting in one of England's most scandalous divorces. When the Prince deserted her, she became the mistress and confidante of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, marrying for convenience a German baron who worshipped her. Later she fell in love with a young Greek count who fought her husband in a duel and eloped with her. He also was unfaithful and, heartbroken at the death of her six-year-old son, she left and travelled in the Orient. She became the mistress of an Albanian general and shared his rough outdoor life as queen of his brigand army, living in caves, riding fiery Arab horses and hunting game in the mountains for food; until she finding that he too was unfaithful. Middle-aged but still stunningly beautiful, she renounced men and headed for Syria where she met and married the love of her life, the Bedouin Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab who was twenty years her junior. During the remainder of her life she lived half the year in the uniquely harsh existence of a desert nomad in the famous Bedu black goat hair tents; the remaining months she spent in the splendid palace she built for herself and Medjuel in Damascus. As wife to the Sheikh and mother to his tribe this passionate woman found not only genuine fulfilment but further adventures, all of which she committed each year to her diary. Mary S Lovell has produced a sympathetic and dramatic portrait from these diaries. (Publisher: Fourth Estate)
Ernest Dowson — Verses (1896)
Ernest Dowson is the tragic poet of the Yellow Nineties. Tuberculosis and absinthe brought him an early death. 'Verses' is his first collection followed by Decorations in 1899. His poems can be grouped into love poems, devotional verses and poems of ennui and world-weariness. Most of us know some lines by Dowson — 'gone with the wind' from Cynara. 'They are not long, the days of wine and roses' from Vitae Summa Brevis.
Theodore Dreiser - Sister Carrie (1900)
'When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.' The tale of Carrie Meeber's rise to stardom in the theatre and George Hurstwood's slow decline captures the twin poles of exuberance and exhaustion in modern city life as never before. The premier example of American naturalism, Dreiser's remarkable first novel has deeply influenced such key writers as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, and Joyce Carol Oates. This edition uses the 1900 text, which is regarded as the author's final version. Long before she was seduced by the cautious and ordinary man whose life she would unravel with no malice and only intermittent interest, the young Carrie Meeber was seduced by the promise of the city--its vitality and reckless possibility, the thrill of material luxury, and the spectacle of power and industry. Banned on publication for its questionable morals, Sister Carrie is the great American novel of seduction, a masterpiece of insight into appetite and innocence. (Publisher: Modern Library Inc)
Alexandre Dumas - The Great Dictionary of Cuisine (1873)
“To be read by worldly people and used by professionals”, Dumas' love of food was said to be equalled only by his love of women. His failing health gave him pause to rethink the enormity of his multi-volume opus, settling on a single volume in the form of dictionary with hundreds of recipes for sauces, soups, meat, fish, eggs, poultry and game:
“Dinner: A major daily activity, which can be accomplished in worthy fashion only by intelligent people. It is not enough to eat. To dine, there must be diversified, calm conversation. It should sparkle with rubies of the wine between courses, be deliciously suave with the sweetness of dessert and acquire true profundity with the coffee.” – A.D. (Publisher: Kegan Paul International)
George Egerton - Keynotes (1893)
A volume of short stories by an unknown author (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) was published by John Lane of 'The Yellow Book', with a cover by Aubrey Beardsley; it caused an immediate sensation. Sexually frank, intensely emotional, these stories caused one reviewer of the time to describe them as suffused with a 'tingling sensation of indecency'. Set against the wild hills and streams of Ireland, the fir trees and deep blue fjords of Norway, and the calm English countryside, these stories tell of the turbulent lives of 'new women', their loves, the yearnings of their souls - and bodies. These are the stories of a literary Isadora Duncan - sexual, passionate and wild - expressing the hunger of women for experience: 'the keynote of woman's witchcraft and woman's strength'. (Publisher: Virago Modern Classics)
Hans Heinz Ewers — Alraune: The Story of a Living Creature (1911)
A Satanist fantasy, inspired by the works of Poe and de Sâde, which was a bestseller in Germany. (Publisher: Side Real Press)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - In a Glass Darkly (1860-1880)
This is a collection of tales of the supernatural, where patients of Dr Heselius are plagued by malignant apparitions and vampires, or are drugged into a state of living death: Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, Carmilla. The doctor usually explains such phenomena in terms of psychopathology, but the author is ambivalent to such theories. (Publisher: Oxford World's Classics)
Gustav Flaubert — Salammbô (1862)
A novel set in Carthage after the first Punic War, is Gustave Flaubert's tour-de-force exercise in the exotic, the morbid, the luxuriant and the violent. Flaubert's fascination with child sacrifice, crucifixions and love unto death give his historical novel a feverish and fantastical quality. Yet it is all underpinned by the author's meticulous research into the history and archaeology of ancient Carthage. (Publisher: Penguin Classics)
(George III) The Prince of Pleasure and His Regency 1811-1820 - JB Priestley (1971)
The Regency Period is perhaps the most romantic of British history. It was an age which swung between extremes of elegance and refinement and depths of sodden brutality. The central figure is the Prince Regent, Prinny, though he sometimes appears as a gigantic spoilt child, he was famously good company and a notable patron of the arts. The Priestley portrays the personalities of the giants of the romantic age - Byron, Shelley, Sheridan, Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott; Davy Faraday and Macadam; Turner, Constable and Cotman - to name a few. It was an age of extravagance; an age marked by great eccentricities and prodigious jokes; the Luddite riots; the Battles of Waterloo and Peterloo; the first waltzes and the first locomotives. [Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1894, J.B. Priestley's first major success was 'The Good Companions' in 1929, a novel of a travelling concert party. Journalist, critic, novelist, playwright and socialist, Priestley was awarded the Order of Merit in 1977 and died in 1984.] (Publisher: Sphere)
The Brothers Grimm - The Complete Fairy Tales (1812-1857)
Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a goose made of gold... the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers created an astonishingly influential imaginative world. However, this is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew, a man marries a snake, a princess sleeps with a frog, and an evil queen dances to death in a pair of burning shoes. Rapunzel innocently asking why her dress was getting tight around her belly and the prince's 'visits' to her step-mother. Violent, funny, disturbing, wise and sometimes beautiful, these stories have intrigued children, adults, scholars, psychologists and artists for centuries. The only complete edition available of the most famous collection of fairy tales ever published, this collection features the 279 stories in an acclaimed, modern and unexpurgated. (Translated by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Vania Zouravliov and published by Vintage Classics.)
André Paul Guillaume Gide – Les Nourritures Terrestres (The Fruits of the Earth) (1897)
In 1891 Gide met Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant aesthete, who set about ridding him of his inhibitions with seductive grace. Gide's first really striking work of moral “subversion” resulted, a set of lyrical exhortations to a fictional youth, Nathanael, who is urged to free himself of the Christian sense of sin and cultivate the life of the senses with sincerity and independence. During the political turmoil of the 1930s Gide returned to the same themes and stylistic manners in Les Nouvelles Nourrituxes (Later Fruits of the Earth) (1935). (Publisher: Vintage Classics)
André Gide – Les Caves du Vatican (1914) (Lafcadio's Adventures & The Vatican Cellars)
The hero, Lafcadio, “lives dangerously” according to the Gidean formula and commits a seemingly senseless murder as a psychologically liberating “gratuitous act.” (Publisher: Penguin Books)
R. Murray Gilchrist — A Night on the Moor & Other Tales of Dread (1st pub.1895)
Before writing extensively on the Peak District, Gilchrist created suffocatingly atmospheric ghostly tales, including The Crimson Weaver, a vampire story published in 'The Yellow Book'. (Publisher: Wordsworth Editions)
Iwan Gilkin - La Nuit (1897)
A true poet of the night, the Belgian Gilkin was much inspired by Baudelaire and Lautréamont for this collection of poems. (Publisher: Bastian Books)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
One of the earliest feminist writers Perkins-Gilman writes a harrowing story of a woman going mad by isolation. The story is written in a very simple style that draws you in with its Poe-esque quality. Believing she has a nervous condition, her husband, always absent, keeps her locked in a room 'for her own sake', a very common attitude at that time. She starts studying this wallpaper to keep sane; instead the peeling yellow wallpaper drives her increasingly insane. The story is a microcosm of a woman's status at the end of the 19th century. (Publisher: Virago)
Remy de Gourmont -Histoires Magiques (1894)
"The stories themselves are tremulous, incense-ridden affairs in which enervated decadents slake their lust." - Mike Petty in 'The Literary Review'. Translated as 'Angels of Perversity'. (Publisher: Dedalus)
Stefan Grabinski — Dark Domain (1993) [/b]
This collection of stories by the 'Polish Poe' were written between 1918 and 1922. They cover all his predilections: the psychological, the mythical, the world of trains and railways, with mysterious travellers reacting to the relentless, hypnotic impetus of mechanical travel and the demonic and the dark, disturbing world of human sexual desire. (Publisher: Dedalus)
John Gray - Silverpoints (1893)
The best known of John Gray's (1866-1934) several collections of poetry is Silverpoints He was a lesser known companion of Wilde. From working class stock, he toiled as an industry apprentice whilst educating himself at evening classes eventually becoming a polyglot and working as a librarian. He became part of the Aesthetic movement and it was through his friends in this circle that he met Oscar Wilde. Their relationship was intense for a couple of years. The infamous Dorian Gray (1891) was named after John (Dorian being a tribe in Ancient Greece, perhaps hinting at homoeroticism), but there is no evidence that the character was based upon John Gray himself. (Publisher: Woodstock Books)
Stanislas de Guaita — La Muse Noire (1883)
A co-founder of l'Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix, de Guaita wrote this collection of poetry after sensibly rejecting a career in the law for mysticism and the occult. (Publisher: A. Lemerre)
H. Rider Haggard - She (1887) 'My empire is of the imagination.' These are the words of Ayesha, the mysterious white queen of a Central African tribe, whose dread title, 'She-who-must-be-obeyed', testifies to her undying beauty and magical powers; but they serve equally well to describe the hold of her author, Henry Rider Haggard, on generations of readers. Writing 'at white heat' and, in the flush of success after the publication of King Solomon's Mines, Haggard drew again on his knowledge of Africa and of ancient legends, but also on something deeper and more disturbing. To the Englishmen who journey through shipwreck, fever and cannibals to her hidden realm, 'She' is the goal of a quest bequeathed to them two thousand years before; to Haggard's readers, 'She' is the embodiment of one of the most potent and ambivalent figures of Western mythology, a female who is both monstrous and desirable - and, without question, deadlier than the male. (Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks)
J.K. Huysmans - A Rebours (1884)
The most significant study of a decadent personality in French Literature. James Smart in The Guardian: “Huysmans' study of obsession and aesthetics got up no end of reviewers' noses on its 1884 publication. It's not hard to see why: decadent aristocrat Jean Floressas des Esseintes, afflicted by nerves so grievous they cause his spine to freeze when he sees a servant wringing out washing, takes turns kicking out at classical poets, modern novelists and the church. The poor are grotesque, the rich are decaying and the bourgeoisie simply insufferable. Only Dickens, Baudelaire and the odd enema provide respite. Cloistered in an opulent house in the suburbs of Paris, Des Esseintes undertakes a series of experiments in living which prove to be an absolute hoot. He decorates an unfortunate tortoise with precious stones, tries to go to England, but only makes it as far as a nearby pub and attempts to turn an urchin into a killer by buying him credit at a brothel. This largely plotless mix of bilious satire, broad comedy and literary criticism may have lost some of its immediacy, but it remains a captivating, contradictory work of art.” (Publisher: Penguin Classics)
J.K. Huysmans — Là-Bas (1891)
The classic tale of Satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century France. Literally translated as “down there”, là-bas is here used by Huysmans in its other sense: Hell. This novel is one of the key texts of the Decadent movement of the 1890s and writhes with satanists, occultists, incubi, succubi and intellectuals. A precursor to the horror fiction of HP Lovecraft and the nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Huysmans' fascination with evil and gore, history and the gothic is clear, although one can be left with the impression of gutter press themes cloaked in a literary veil. As the first and the darkest, in a tetralogy about conversion to Catholicism, there is at least the hope of redemption to follow.
Durtal is a disaffected, middle-aged writer living in Paris, not unlike Huysmans himself. Working on a biography of Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century nobleman and mass murderer widely thought to be the model for Bluebeard, Durtal researches Rais' obsession with alchemy. Through this, he becomes drawn into the underworld of 19th-century satanic worship. This sounds racy and some areas of the novel do not disappoint: several set-pieces - the description of a crucifixion, Rais' murderous rampage and the climactic debauched satanic mass - are described in vivid and barbaric prose. The rest follows the conversations of Durtal's friends over elaborate dinners in a gothic bell tower: peppered with references to historical figures and demonology, the obsessive detail at times verges on the comic. Durtal's friend des Hermies reports in the tones of a gossiping housewife that one devil-worshipping priest “fattens fish on consecrated wafers and toxic substances ... fortified by sacrilegious rites ... [then] leaves them to putrefy and extracts their essential oils”. (Publisher: Dedalus)
Henry James - The Turn of the Screw (1898)
A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncles at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here - 'Sir Edmund Orme', 'Owen Wingrave', and 'The Friends of the Friends' - 'The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's 'infernal imagination', which torments but also enthrals her? 'The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, 'the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'? (Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks)
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907).
His influence has been considerable. While he himself owes much to Rabelais, movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism Cubism, Theatre of the Absurd - all owe debts to his works. Picasso, Flann O'Brien, The Marx Brothers, the Goons, Mad magazine, Robert Anton Wilson, Monty Python and their spawn were all influenced by Jarry, whether they knew it or not .
Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911)
This anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Written in 1898 and refused for publication in the author's lifetime, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll recounts the adventures of the inventor of "'Pataphysics… the science of imaginary solutions." 'Pataphysics has since inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and the '60s rock band Soft Machine, as well as the mythic literary organization, the Collège de 'Pataphysique. This most important novel by Jarry has never before been published under its own title in English. "The complement to the Ubu plays… a stupendous effort to create out of the ruins Ubu had left behind a new system of values… Jarry would have found an audience more readily had he written simply a work of science fiction, a symbolist narrative, a bawdy tale, or a spiritual allegory. As it is, Faustroll is [all of these] at the same time" — Roger Shattuck, author of 'The Banquet Years'
The Ubu Plays: "Ubu Rex", "Ubu Cuckolded", "Ubu Enchained", "Writings on the Theatre"
A re-issue of three plays that ushered in the great age of absurdist theatre. There was a riot at the first performance of Ubu Roi on 10 December 1896, when Firmin Gemier, playing Ubu, strode to the footlights and roared: "Merde!" at the audience, and theatre would never be the same again. Ubu became a force to be reckoned with in literature, art and politics. Jarry wrote more exploits for him and took to acting the role of Ubu himself in his own brief, strange life. This volume contains lively modern translations by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor of Ubu Roi, Ubu Cocu and Ubu Enchaine as well as Jarry's writings on theatre."The Ubu explosion sent shrapnel flying into the next century. Dada, Surrealism, Pataphysics, Theatre of Cruelty, the Absurd - all owe a debt to Jarry." (Charles Marowitz, Encore) (Publisher: Methuen Drama)
Edmund John — Flute of Sardonyx (1913)
Writing in the Uranian School*, these desperately passionate odes to unsullied youth were published just before John died in Sicily. It appears alongside exquisite pencil drawings (reproduced by subtle lithography). * Using a term coined in 1864 by advocates of homosexual emancipation to describe a comradely love breaking down class and gender barriers, the School was a group of Oxbridge Classicists, writing between the 1870s to the 1930s, who wrote of persons of The Third Sex – those with “a female psyche in a male body”. Somewhat notoriously, they also eulogised the Ancient Greek tradition of an older man mentoring a callow youth in a sex-for-knowledge accord. (Publisher: Old Stile Press)
Lautréamont, Le Comte de, (Isidore Ducasse) Les Chants de Maldoror (1868)
Insolent and defiant, 'The Chants de Maldoror', by the self-styled Comte de Lautréamont (1846-70), depicts a sinister and sadistic world of unrestrained savagery and brutality. One of the earliest and most astonishing examples of surrealist writing, it follows the experiences of Maldoror, a master of disguises pursued by the police as the incarnation of evil, as he makes his way through a nightmarish realm of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites and prostitutes, lunatics and strange children. Delirious, erotic, blasphemous and grandiose by turns, this hallucinatory novel captured the imagination of artists and writers as diverse as Modigliani, Verlaine, André Gide and André Breton; it was hailed by the twentieth-century Surrealist movement as a formative and revelatory masterpiece. (Publisher: Penguin Classics)
Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), 1856-1935
Vernon Lee was the pen name for an English writer named Violet Page who, French-born, lived much of her life in Italy. She wrote and published more than 40 books, collections of short stories, essays and novels in her lifetime and several of her books are still in print. She wrote on just about every subject imaginable, but had a particular fondness for Italian art, like her 'Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy' (1880); fantasy, like 'Hauntings' (1890) Lee brought the femme fatale into Victorian literature with this landmark collection of supernatural tales and contributed to 'The Yellow Book'; and travel, like 'The Sentimental Traveller' (1908). She also wrote children's stories, as well as political, critical and psychological essays. Beginning in the 1890s, Lee formed a permanent lesbian relationship with the painter Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson (1857-1921), living with her six months of every year in Florence experimenting with the psychological aspects of colour and art.
Lady Tal in Vanitas: Polite Stories (1911)
A short story, “Lady Tal” exposes the shaky borderline between art and life which Wilde also metamorphosises against. Vernon Lee's story not only demonstrates the culture of the chameleon, but also crosses the boundaries between traditional male and female behaviour, the indeterminacy of gender underlying the indeterminate nature of art's relation to the life it proposes to represent. Jervase Marion, a novelist very much alike Henry James, is reduced by the end of the story to a feminine caricature, nicknamed Maryanne by the handsome and dashing neophyte writer, Lady Tal. Her story becomes his story, so the masculine artist is shown to be entirely at the mercy of his feminine object who is also an artist. Like Wilde, Vernon Lee asks the question: How does one distinguish the artist from his art? (Publisher: BiblioBazaar)
Supernatural Tales - Excursions into Fantasy
This collection, offers six intriguing stories by Vernon Lee. Five of these stories take place in Italy; decaying mansions and aging ruins seem sombre and vaguely menacing. Vernon Lee's detailed descriptions of faded tapestries, darkened paintings and crumbling architecture reflect her lifelong passion for Italian art, music and architecture: Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady: A worn and discoloured tapestry depicting a disturbing vision - a woman that is part reptilian - fascinates unduly, almost obsessively, the young Prince Alberic, grandson to Duke Balthasar. A Wedding Chest: This short tale reveals the ghastly history of art auction item no. 428, a much stained and damaged coffer intended for garments and jewels of a bride. Lee's imaginative tale is one of kidnapping and murder. Amour Dure: A classic story of the evil that dieth not and is perhaps the most frightening in this collection. A visiting scholar becomes increasingly obsessed with the legend of Medea Malatesta, a dangerous, seductively beautiful woman whose lovers remained hopelessly faithful until their death, even when betrayed and dying under torture. A Wicked Voice: The singer Balthasar Cesari, known popularly as Zaffrino, was said to have made a pact with the devil in return for vocal gifts greater than any singer, ancient or modern. A visiting Norwegian composer unwisely scoffs at this legend. The Legend of Madame Krasinka: It is said that on occasion the dead are forgiving for abuse and mistreatment in life. Perhaps. The Virgin of the Seven Daggers: Don Juan Gusman del Pulgar, Count of Miramor, in his prayers admits that he has committed every crime without faltering, including murder, perjury, blasphemy and sacrilege; he only asks of Madonna of the Seven Daggers to save him from eternal fire. In return, he promises to assert by tongue and sword to all that no lady was ever so fair as our Lady of the Seven Daggers. This account relates the rather unusual circumstances in which Don Juan honours his promise. (Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd)
Edited Tue 11 Jan 11, 8:07 PM by Mad_Monk
