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The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles, here presented in English for the first time in a translation by Brian Stableford, is one of the most unusual works of Charles Nodier, and can readily be seen as a remote precursor of Alfred Jarry's "pataphysics," Guillaume Apollinaire's "surrealism" and Dadaism. Originally published in 1830, more than a hundred years before the publication of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Nodier's novel, like the latter, is a highly avant-garde work of dream fiction. It is deliberately incoherent, and in places deliberately incomprehensible, but its incoherence is never without an underlying purpose and an underlying schema, partly because it takes for granted the thesis that the apparent incoherence, inconsequentiality and incomprehensibility of real dreams must have an underlying purpose, however arcane, and an underlying schema, however bizarre-and that expeditions in literary surrealism are valuable processes of exploration, capable of offering valuable and unique rewards. It is, in its own peculiar fashion, a masterpiece of intelligence, wit and literary artistry. This edition of The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles supplements the title novel with three related texts: "On the Phenomena of Sleep," an essay on dreams, and two biographical fantasies, "Polichinelle," and "The Bibliomaniac."
