'Les Chants de Maldoror' was virtually ignored when first published in 1869, a year before the author's death in Paris in 1870. Decades later the Surrealists discovered the work and hailed Lautr

In this book, Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism.

'A major talent' Irvine Welsh 'Remarkable, beautiful, magic. Like Ulysses for those who can't cope with reading Ulysses' Paolo Hewitt 'We're all in the gutter but some of us are ogling the sparkles.' Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the 20th century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a 'fantabulosa crime' in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter - but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended. Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet's jailbird fantasies, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.

The question of the sublime, which links the idea of aesthetic force with rhetorical impact and moral law, has been an important topic in discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and the shift between them. This book argues that the sublime is equally important in understanding the shift from romanticism to modernism later in the century. The author studies the work of three French authors conventionally considered pivotal figures in the trajectory from romanticism to modernism: Hugo, father of romanticism; Baudelaire, precursor of symbolist modernism; and Lautreamont, hero of (post) modernism. She traces this literary-historical as Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize and L'Homme qui rit, Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris and Petits poemes en prose, and Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror and Poesies - all seen from a perspective of the aesthetics of the sublime. This perspective is developed through analyses of the treatises on the sublime by Longinus, Boileau, Burke, and Kant.

Survey of the illustrative work of Salvador Dalí. Includes reproductions of work from The Divine Comedy, the Holy Bible, and Les Chants de Maldoror.