Spicilege - Marcel Schwob

'Spicilege', Schwob’s last book published under his name, constitutes the handbook to his work: to himself as erudite scholar and author, and to the era of French Symbolism. These essays display his groundbreaking research on François Villon, his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is his ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy that capture attention today.Schwob was, as Paul Léautaud described him, a 'living library', and the critical biographies gathered in the essays of Spicilege display a few of the volumes in that library: his groundbreaking research on François Villon (work that remains a cornerstone to our knowledge of Villon), his passion for Robert Louis Stevenson and his encounters with such less-remembered writers as George Meredith. But it is the carefully developed ideas in these essays and the eccentric yet thorough scholarship that draws them together that are of particular interest today: the understanding of criminal slang in the Middle Ages; the study of prostitution in ancient Greece; the folklore inspired by a Flaubert story; a complex critique of individuality that effectively laid the groundwork for Jarry’s 'pataphysics'; as well as ruminations on perversity, laughter, biography, love, terror and pity, and art and anarchy.Marcel Schwob (1867–1905) was a scholar of startling breadth, an incomparable storyteller and a secret influence on generations of writers, from Apollinaire and Borges to Roberto Bolaño and J. Rodolfo Wilcock.

Wakefield Press, 2022
English
Softcover, 224 Pages
200 mm x 130 mm