Lorrain, Jean
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of French poet, playwright and author Paul Alexandre Martin Duval (1855-1906), active (but already in ill health) from the early 1880s. The contes cruels and fantasticated fever-dreams for which he remains best known, and which established him as a central exponent (and dweller within) of late nineteenth-century Decadence, edge occasionally into sf topoi, but are more easily thought of in terms of a loosened Fantastika. Of his work, Monsieur de Phocas: Astarté: Roman (1901; trans Francis Amery as Monsieur de Phocas 1994) interestingly closes in on a literal dramatizing of the soul's self-destructive journey into an interior landscape precisely designed – like the painting in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – to entrap the voyager. [JC]
Paul Alexandre Martin Duval
born Fécamp, Normandy, France: 9 August 1855
died Fécamp, Normandy, France: 30 June 1906
works (highly selected)
- Buveurs d'âmes (Paris: G Charpentier and E Fasquelle, 1893) [binding unknown/]
- The Soul-Drinker: And Other Decadent Fantasies (England: Snuggly Press, 2016) [coll: trans by Brian Stableford of the above plus other material: pb/]
- Monsieur de Phocas: Astarté: Roman (Paris: Librairie Paul Ollendorff, 1901) [binding unknown/]
- Monsieur de Phocas (Sawtry, Cambridgeshire: Dedalus, 1994) [trans by Brian Stableford as by Francis Amery of the above: pb/]
- Sensations et Souvenirs (Paris: G Charpentier and E Fasquelle, 1905) [coll: binding unknown/]
- Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker (Leyburn, North Yorkshire: Tartarus Press, 2002) [coll: trans by Brian Stableford of the above with added material: pb/]
links
previous versions of this entry