Books by Xavier B Saintine

X. B. Saintine (1978-1865) was a prolific dramatist who collaborated in more than 200 plays with Eugène Scribe and a noted figure of the Romantic Movement. Jonathan the Visionary (1823) is a collection of fantasy tales told by a mysterious immortal called Jonathan (who is only featured as an active narrator in a few of them). It includes The Story of an Antediluvian Civilization, which retells the history of a civilization from Ethiopia, only a few distant echoes of which survive today. Ranging from prehistorical fantasy to post-apocalypse, it provides a prophetic indication of the manner in which our own civilization might degenerate. The fact that scientific and technological progress is presented here as a symptom of social disease makes Saintine's vision more modern and radical than any of his contemporaries.

X. B. Saintine (1978-1865) was a prolific dramatist who collaborated in more than 200 plays with Eugène Scribe and a noted figure of the Romantic Movement. The Second Life (1864) was Saintine's swan song. This collection of fictitious dreams, hallucinations and metaphysical fantasies examine the nature of dreaming from a viewpoint infused by contemporary psychological science, when the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations had begun to attract serious attention, but had not yet reduced to Freudian analyses. The Second Life is a remarkable book, as much in its self-indulgence as in its strangeness, covering a remarkably wide spectrum, while always retaining a firm moral anchorage. It is one of the finest and most ambitious 19th century extensions of the tradition of contes philosophiques.