Cette uvre (edition relie) fait partie de la serie TREDITION CLASSICS. La maison d'edition tredition, basee a Hambourg, a publie dans la serie TREDITION CLASSICS des ouvrages anciens de plus de deux millenaires. Ils etaient pour la plupart epuises ou uniquement disponible chez les bouquinistes. La serie est destinee a preserver la litterature et a promouvoir la culture. Avec sa serie TREDITION CLASSICS, tredition a comme but de mettre a disposition des milliers de classiques de la litterature mondiale dans differentes langues et de les diffuser dans le monde entier.

Alfred Jarry is best known as the author of the proto-Dada play "Ubu Roi," but this anarchic novel of absurdist philosophy is widely regarded as the central work to his oeuvre. Written in 1989 and refused for publication in the author's lifetime, "Exploits and Opinion of Dr. Faustroll" recounts the adventures of the inventor of "Pataphysics . . . the science of imaginary solutions." Pataphysics has since inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and the 60s rock band Soft Machine, as well as the mythic literary organization the College de Pataphysique. Simon Watson Taylor's superb annotated translation (which in turn inspired a new French edition of the text) was first published by Grove Press in 1965 as part of their now out-of-print collection, "Selected Works of Alfred Jarry." As a result, this most important novel by Jarry has never before been published under its own title in English.

Controversial play, an early absurdist drama, immediately outraged audiences--and highly influenced subsequent literature--in 1898 for its scatalogical references and pompous style. Ubu--the cruel, gluttonous main character--is the author's metaphor for modern man. Unabridged republication of the English translation by Beverley Keith and G. Legman originally published in 1953.

Drama. Translated from the French by Rob Melrose. A new translation of the classic play. UBU ROI has divided audiences into passionate, dissenting camps since its 1896 premiere in Paris, an event that changed theater forever. With the first word of the play the audience erupted in pandemonium. People stormed the exits as fist fights broke out. UBU was a scatological mockery that challenged assumptions about good taste and good behavior, a performance that questioned the very nature of theater and divided the audience between those who came expecting the ordinary and those who came hoping for the extraordinary. Now UBU is seen as the precursor of the theatre of the absurd and playwrights like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. Rob Melrose's new translation brings out the Shakespearean echoes of UBU while using words from classic American comedy to get the Punch and Judy feel.

Drama. Translated from the German and French by Rob Melrose. This collection brings together new translations of three classic modernist plays: WOYZECK by Georg Buchner; PELLEAS AND MELISANDE by Maurice Maeterlinck; and UBU ROI by Alfred Jarry; with a foreword by Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater, an introduction by Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama, and an afterword by translator Rob Melrose."To bring these three plays together into a single volume is to embrace a heritage of modernist experiment, left us by young men in their 20s living in the 19th century. It is a heritage that redefined risk as it redefined theater and the purposes it serves."--Paul Walsh

Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) is admired today as the creator of a new tradition of humor. The Garden of Priapus is undoubtedly the best novel of Jarry's mature period. It is historical romance in episodic form, a series of tableaux of Rome in her decadence.