The Biography of Manuel

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The Biography of Manuel is a fantasy series by James Branch Cabell. It traces the life of the fictional character Dom Manuel who became Count of Poictesme (a fictional province of France), and of his physical and spiritual descendants through many generations.

The series is more fully titled The Biography of the Life of Manuel, notwithstanding the implicit redundancy.

The Biography is a mix of fantasies, historical romances, verse, plays, and essays, but Cabell said that he considered it a single work. The works comprising the Biography are as follows. The numbers refer to the volumes of the uniform Storisende Edition prepared under Cabell's personal supervision. Numbers such as 13a indicate that the work formed only a part of volume 13 of the Storisende Edition.

The conceit of the series is that the life of Dom Manuel the Redeemer did not end in his death but was continued in his heirs. The life of each follows the same pattern.

The comedy is always the same. In the first act the hero imagines a place where happiness exists. In the second he strives towards that goal. In the third he comes up short or what amounts to the same thing he achieves his goal only to find that happiness lies a little further down the road.

  • Beyond Life #1 (1919) (nominally fiction but essentially an essay on life and fiction-writing)
  • Figures of Earth #2 (1921) (The tale of the rise of Dom Manuel himself from swineherd to count)
  • The Silver Stallion #3 (1926) (the story the Lords of the Silver Stallion, Manuel's court, after his death)
  • Domnei #4a (an earlier version of this was published as The Soul of Melicent)
  • The Music from Behind the Moon #4b (1926)
  • Chivalry #5 (1909: although the 1909 first edition had no references to Manuel, later revised editions added references to Manuel)
  • Jurgen #6 (1919) (Cabell's most famous book)
  • The Line of Love #7 (1905)
  • The High Place #8 (1923)
  • Gallantry #9 (1907)
  • Something About Eve #10 (1927)
  • The Certain Hour #11 (1916)
  • The Cords of Vanity #12 (1909)
  • From the Hidden Way #13a (1916) (verse)
  • The Jewel Merchants #13b (1921) (play)
  • The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck #14 (1915)
  • The Eagle's Shadow #15 (1904)
  • The Cream of the Jest #16a (1917)
  • The Lineage of Lichfield, #16b (1922) (a fantastic genealogy of the Biography)
  • Straws and Prayer-Books #17 (1924) (essays, plus one fantasy story)
  • Townsend of Lichfield #18a (essay)
  • The Way of Ecben #18b (a sort of literary Hail and Fairewell)
  • The White Robe #18c
  • Sonnets of Antan #18d (verse)
  • Taboo, #18e (a thinly veiled fantasy-style recounting of the Jurgen obscenity trial)
    • (the #18 Storisende volume also contains several more essays and appendices)
  • The Witch-Woman (consists of three related books: The Music From Behind the Moon, The Way of Ecben, and The White Robe, from the Biography, plus a new introduction); (not part of the Storisende edition). The stories illustrate how men with the three basic attitudes towards life, the poetic, the he chivalrous, and the gallant deal with the love of Ettarre, the witch-woman.
  • Preface to the Past (prefaces and notes extracted from the Storisende Edition)

The "Heirs and Assigns" Trio:

These are related to the Biography but are not part of the main sequence.

[edit] External links

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