Cervantes in Madrid, and Other Texts –– by Alphonse Brot

The tenuous legacy left by Alphonse Brot is incongruous and paradoxical: though the earliest writer on record to explicitly declare himself a part of the creative “avant-garde”, he figures prominently in none of its histories or memoirs; though a co-founder in his youth of the Bouzingo (a.k.a. Jeunes-France) group, he was remembered by his comrades as the least radical member of that most radical grouping of the Romanticist movement; despite his association with the most bizarre and antisocial manifestations of underground culture, he spent his last four decades as a best-selling novelist and playwright –– only to be forgotten by century’s end. Yet his work requires re-evaluation, particularly the unknown little masterpiece “Cervantes in Madrid”, recently rediscovered and here reprinted for the first time in 190 years, in which Romanticist irony and the exaggerated conventions of popular melodrama are pushed to the point of metafiction, a foreshadowing of the work of Borges, and Barthes’ “The Death of the Author”.

With illustrations by Brot’s collaborators and a bio-critical introduction by translator & editor Olchar E. Lindsann. Cover by Célestin Nanteuil.

32 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. Nov., 2024/A.Da. 108/A.H. 194
$4.00 + s/h