The Solar Circus is the great forgotten masterpiece of French symbolist literature. Written by Gustave Kahn-the man whom Stéphane Mallarmé and Jules Laforgue credited as inventing free-verse poetry-the novel drips in decadent images of pastoral vistas, exotic gemstones, merfolk, and a phantasmagoric menagerie. Inverting day for night and reality for a dazzling dream, The Solar Circus tells the story of a solipsistic, isolated Bavarian Count who falls in love with the star of a traveling circus. Their relationship, in both love and jealousy, dramatizes that great tension between the inner life of contemplation and the dynamic beauty of the external world. And as they set out from the count's castle, the couple examines this duality while encountering a world in transformation: peasants in rebellion, the bright lights of London's Orpheum theater, and even an ether-swilling Jack the Ripper in an opium den.Best known as a poet and member of the symbolist movement, The Solar Circus showcases Kahn's talents as a narrative writer and bears the hallmarks of many of the poetic endeavors unique to late 19th century. Indeed, in the same way that the novel's circus coaxes the count out of oppressive isolation, so too does Kahn's prose lead the reader in new and fantastic directions. The Solar Circus is a text unlike any other, one that vacillates effortlessly between imagistic poetry and obliquely philosophical prose, prefiguring those seminal 20th century works of modernist literature which would appear more than two decades later.