"The Romantic Agony" and Other Books

On a shelf fallen prey to dust and dampness in Mustansiriyah University Centreal Library, Baghdad lay a volume dear to my heart titled, "The Romantic Agony", by University of Rome Professor of English Literature Mario Praz. The book is mainly on the Marquis de Sade. When I joined Mustansiriyah University in September 1992, I eyed that book, and at once I borrowed it and re-read it, as I had read it in Leeds University's Brotherton Library a couple of decades earlier, and half a decade before Leeds I had read it in Mosul University Central Library.It is one of those books the heart grows fond of as time goes by. It is an evergreen book, like TS Eliot's "The Sacred Wood", G Wilson Knight's "The Wheel of Fire", Eric Bentley's "The Playwright as Thinker", George Steiner's "The Death of Tragedy",  Martin Esslin's "The Theatre of the Absurd", Hugh Kenner's "The Pound Era", Robert Brustein's "The Theatre of Revolt" and Jan Kott's "Shakespeare Our Contemporary"
Mario Praz (1896-1982), author of the monumental phenomenal book The Romantic Agony, Italian literary critic and arts historian, got his BA at University of Florence and his PhD in English Literature at University of Liverpool where he was later appointed lectrurer in English Literature. In 1930, he published came la morte e il diavolo, translated into English, titled The Romantic Agony in which book, Praz traced the embedded and overt erotic and sadistic impulses in the Romantic movement through the work of Baudelaire, de Sade, Flaubert and Oscar Wilde