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My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man

By Georges Bataille
Penguin Classics
Series: Penguin Modern Classics
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Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man by Georges Bataille is a collection weaving existential themes and provocative narratives. It explores the depths of human desire through three distinct stories, each delving into the limits of eroticism, mysticism, and the darker aspects of the human psyche. Bataille challenges conventional morality, inviting readers to confront uncomfortable truths about identity and mortality.
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book may appeal to you if you are drawn to provocative and existential literature that delves into the depths of human desire and mortality. Georges Bataille's work often explores the boundaries of eroticism, taboo, and the search for meaning through philosophical narratives. If you're intrigued by challenging themes and are open to exploring the darker aspects of human nature, this might be an engaging read for you.

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Presents depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality.

In these three works of erotic prose Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self.This volume also contains Bataille's own introductions to his texts as well as essays by Yukio Mishima.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Three works of erotic prose fusing sex and spirituality, new to Penguin Modern Classics.

In these three works of erotic prose, Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality.

Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille's death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire.

This volume also contains Bataille's own introductions to his texts, as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings.

Series: Penguin Modern Classics

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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man showcases Bataille's impressive power of prose and maintains a compelling capacity to shock readers, as noted by the Literary Review.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780141195551

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 07 June 2012

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Classics

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 13.0mm

Width: 129.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 159g

Pages: 208

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Best Sellers at Book Hero Fiction General Fiction Georges Bataille In Stock Books In-Stock Fiction Books Literary Fiction New Release Fiction Penguin Books Penguin Classics Penguin Classics: General Fiction Series: Penguin Modern Classics

About the Author

Georges Bataille, French essayist and novelist, was born in 1897. He converted to Catholicism, then to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism. As curator of the municipal library in Orleans, he led a relatively simple life, although he became involved, usually on the fringes, with the surrealist movement. He founded the literary review Critique in 1946, which he edited until his death in 1962, and was also a founder of the review Documents, which published many of the leading surrealist writers. His writing is a mixture of poetry and philosophy, fantasy and history, and his first novel, Story of the Eye, was written under the pseudonym of Lord Auch. Bataille's other works include the novels Blue of Noon and L'Abbe C, and the volumes of essays Eroticism and Literature and Evil.

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  • Eroticism
    An influential exploration of sex and its surrounding taboos. A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer, and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study, he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of...
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  • Literature and Evil
    An extraordinary collection of essays arguing for literature's complicity with evil, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Literature is not innocent, stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë's...
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  • Story of the Eye
    In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's...
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  • Critical Essays
    An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille's postwar philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of World War II, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by "a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way," and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual...
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    The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its...
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    Critical Essays – Volume 1, 1944–1948
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    Theory of Religion
    Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Bataille's earlier book, The Accursed Share, brought to anthropology and history; namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. Bataille brilliantly defines religion as so many different attempts to respond to the universe's relentless generosity. Framed within his original theory of generalized economics and based on his masterly reading of archaic...
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    The Accursed Share
    Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals...
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    The Cradle of Humanity
    A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war in history—with...
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    Visions of Excess
    Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Bataille's positions are most...
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    This volume collects the most intimate writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. These essays, aphorisms, notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice clarify and extend Bataille's radical theology, his philosophy of history, and his ecstatic method of meditation. The "system" that emerges from his body of...
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