Midnight

<p>Although highly respected within Spain as an author public intellectual and cultural provocateur Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) is little known outside his native country. This edition will help remedy this by presenting the first English translation of Valle-Inclán's innovative First World War chronicle accompanied by a critical introduction that situates the author within the central concerns of European modernism. A remarkable innovator who wrote poetry novels drama essays and art criticism Valle-Inclán was a strong influence on a generation of literary and visual artists and his work is in conversation with the literary experimentation of modernists such as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.</p><p><em>Midnight</em> is a powerful account of Valle-Inclán's experiences on the Western Front in 1916. From a distant all-encompassing perspective what Valle-Inclán refers to as 'astral vision' the Poet who 'deserves to be called Seer' creates out of the devastating fragments that characterize individual experience of war a view of the whole<em> </em>outside of time and space. <em>Midnight</em>'s distillation of experience brings into sharp relief the horrors of war and the suffering of those caught up in it.</p><p>Valle-Inclán's desire to disengage experience from its fragmentary expression in language and to observe from a position of cosmic omniscience along with the theosophical underpinnings of his aesthetics inspired literary innovations that ensure his place among the foremost modernists of Europe and the Americas.</p>