Bücher von Catulle Mendès

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The present volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles 23 tales of the fantastique dealing with anomalous events and altered states of consciousness that might or might not have supernatural causes. Other writers such as Marcel Schwob have written stories of the same kind, but Mendès' work in that vein is particularly interesting, not merely by virtue of its profusion and its uncommon imaginative range, but also because of its macabre humor and its straightforward disturbing aspects. That combination of effects makes the present collection unique with in the field of weird fiction, and quite fascinating.

This volume is one of a set of three collections assembling a substantial fraction of the short fantastic fiction of Catulle Mendès (1841-1909). It assembles more than eighty contes, fables and apologues employing supernatural motifs The light-hearted flippancy of the majority of the stories collected here has its own heroic dimension in blithely sacrificing the copious resource of narrative energy to be found in the Devil's works in order to focus much more extensively on the kindly ministrations of angels, Eros and other benign figures. It is a testament of Mendès' ingenuity that the sacrifice in question was not a costly one, permitting him to maintain a level of productivity that few writers of his era could match. Whimsy might look easy to a reader, but it is not nearly as easy for an author. Few writers have ever been able to draw from that particular well as prolifically and consistently as Catulle Mendès, and there are only a precious few whose work could be assembled into a kaleidoscopic display of phantasmagorical materials as rich as this one.

Catulle Mendès (1841-1909) wrote more tales featuring fays than any other French writer-nearly twice as many as Madame d'Aulnoy. However, by the 1880s, the genre had been largely misremembered and remained unread for a hundred years. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Mendès elected to draw his own imaginative raw materials from Shakespeare rather from than any original French sources.Even though his tales feature a different species of fays, Mendès' belated contributions to the genre have closer affinities with it than he may have suspected. He is a deliberately subversive writer, not only employing the narrative dynamic of his fantasies to insist that amour is far from perfect, but frequently applauding certain aspects of that imperfection.This volume provides a useful illustration of a significant, if eccentric, phase in the history of the genre.