Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams

Ford, Mark

ISBN 10: 0801438640 / ISBN 13: 9780801438646

Published by Cornell University Press, 2000

About this Item

This item is worn. Signs of wear may include aesthetic issues such as scratches, dents and worn corners. All pages and the cover are intact, but the dust cover may be missing. Pages may include moderate to heavy number of notes and highlighting, but the text is not obscured or unreadable.

Seller Inventory # 59WS4H001FFY_ns

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801438640
• ISBN 13: 9780801438646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

Raymond Roussel, one of the most outlandishly compelling literary figures of modern times, died in mysterious circumstances at the age of fifty-six in 1933. The story Mark Ford tells about Roussel's life and work is at once captivating, heartbreaking, and almost beyond belief. Could even Proust or Nabokov have invented a character as strange and memorable as the exquisite dandy and graphomaniac this book brings to life?

Roussel's poetry, novels, and plays influenced the work of many well-known writers and artists: Jean Cocteau found in him "genius in its pure state," while Salvador Dalí, who died with a copy of Roussel's Impressions d'Afrique on his bedside table, believed him to be one of France's greatest writers ever. Edmond Rostand, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Michel Foucault, and Alain Robbe-Grillet all testified to the power of his unique imagination.

By any standards, Roussel led an extraordinary life. Tremendously wealthy, he took two world tours during which he hardly left his hotel rooms. He never wore his clothes more than twice, and generally avoided conversation because he dreaded that it might turn morbid. Ford, himself a poet, traces the evolution of Roussel's bizarre compositional methods and describes the idiosyncrasies of a life structured as obsessively as Roussel structured his writing.

About the Author

Mark Ford's poetry has been praised by Helen Vendler and John Bayley, among others, and by leading poets in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Ford is a Lecturer in English Literature at University College London. John Ashbery's books of poetry have won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.