My Fantoms - Hardcover

Gautier, Theophile

4.05

277 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0704321033 ISBN 13: 9780704321038

Publisher: Quartet Books, 1976

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Romantic provocateur, flamboyant bohemian, precocious novelist, perfect poet―not to mention an inexhaustible journalist, critic, and man-about-town―Th�ophile Gautier is one of the major figures, and great characters, of French literature.
In My Fantoms Richard Holmes, the celebrated biographer of Shelley and Coleridge, has found a brilliantly effective new way to bring this great but too-little-known writer into English. My Fantoms assembles seven stories spanning the whole of Gautier's career into a unified work that captures the essence of his adventurous life and subtle art. From the erotic awakening of "The Adolescent" through "The Poet," a piercing recollection of the mad genius G�rard de Nerval, the great friend of Gautier's youth, My Fantoms celebrates the senses and illuminates the strange disguises of the spirit, while taking readers on a tour of modernity at its most mysterious. "What ever would the Devil find to do in Paris?" Gautier wonders." He would meet people just as diabolical as he, and find himself taken for some na�ve provincial..."
Tapestries, statues, and corpses come to life; young men dream their way into ruin; and Gautier keeps his faith in the power of imagination: "No one is truly dead, until they are no longer loved."

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

"Gautier was a leading writer of the Romantic movement and forms a bridge between the supernatural fiction of Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann and the pivotal pulp magazine Weird Tales."-Cynthia Ward

"Theophile Gautier was one of the most important writers of fantastic tales in France during the Romantic period."-The Modern Language Journal

"It is in Theophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously
used, is recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound." -H. P. Lovecraft

Gautier writes ..".stories of remarkable artistry, rich in irony and nostalgia, in which the subtle play of passion with terror is expressed in a precise, elegant prose style." --The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror & the Supernatural

About the Author:

Th�ophile Gautier (1811-1872), whose father was a minor government functionary, was born in southwestern France, but when he was three his family moved to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life. The young Gautier wanted to make his name as a painter until, at eighteen, he met Victor Hugo and decided to become a writer. Instead; within a year he had published his first collection of poetry. Gautier also formed an early and deep attachment to the brilliant but troubled poet G�rard de Nerval, and the two of them became central to the the Jeune-France movement, celebrated for its Bohemian dandyism and aesthetic provocations. (Gautier became especially notorious for the red vest he wore to the opening of Hugo's play Hernani.) In 1836 Gautier published the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, a succ�s de scandale that is the source of the phrase "art for art's sake," and later that year, he was hired as a critic for the daily paper La Presse, in which capacity he was to champion the work of Baudelaire, Berlioz, Delacroix, Heine and the Goncourt brothers. Gautier himself continued to publish poetry, short stories, literary criticism, plays, and ballets, including the scenario for the ballet Giselle and the unfinished History of Romanticism, which he was working on at the time of his death.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.