London: Chatto & Windus, 1905. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Small octavo in red cloth, gilt titles, deckle textblock; 257 pp; 20 cm About good(+) with modest sunning to spine, shelf wear to top and tail; book plate to paste-down endpaper; pages clean; volume is protected in mylar. A respectable, readable, covetable copy. Hardcover. Simple personal bookplate of one Henry Eager Mason of Highland Park, [Illinois] to front paste-down. A peculiarly revealing work by Frederick Rolfe—Baron Corvo—one in which his Italianate fantasies, Catholic symbolism, and obsessive self-mythologizing dissolve into something dreamlike, brittle, and intensely personal. The novel resists ordinary narrative coherence, drifting instead through reverie and projection, with “kataleptic” functioning less as diagnosis than as metaphor for suspended will and arrested desire; its titular figure is not so much a character as a phantasm through which Rolfe stages aristocratic longing, aesthetic absolutism, and spiritual desolation. Homoeroticism permeates the book, though rarely in direct statement: male beauty, devotion, hierarchy, and ritualized intimacy carry an unmistakable queer charge, displaced into atmosphere rather than plot, and sharpened by Rolfe’s rejection of bourgeois heterosexual norms. Muted on publication and long overshadowed by Hadrian the Seventh, the novel now reads as a compelling late document of imaginative extremity and inward collapse, while its sole lifetime edition. | Fin-de-siècle decadence, Corvoiana, Early queer literatur; Gay authors, 19th Century. Fiction, History, Italie Histoire 1492-1559 Romans, nouvelles, etc, Italy, Italy History 1492-1559 Fiction
