Œuvres: 2013—2024
The third annual edition of Dean Kyte’s Œuvres covers fully a dozen years of the writer’s flâneurial literary since the publication of his first book at the end of 2012. More than thirty new pieces penned by Kyte in 2024 have been added to the volume, including the author’s first works written entirely in French, significantly amplifying and enhancing the collection.
As Kyte states in his preface, 2024—the author’s forty-first year—is distinguished in his œuvre by the effective integration of French into his style and its synthesis with English. New works in the present edition, ranging from verse composed in French to the first canonical episodes of The Melbourne Flâneur podcast, demonstrate a ‘crystallization’ in Dean Kyte’s thought around the theme of French as both language and culture, and its flâneurial relationship to Australian life.
Sections of the volume collating Kyte’s prose poetry and fiction are significantly expanded in the 2024 edition, with the French influence on his style now clearly revealing an original yet coherent vision of contemporary Australian life. Works in The Spleen of Melbourne project (including the nouvelles démeublées noires of The Melbourne Flâneur) display a new sureness of vision and expressive command of the syncretic literary language Kyte has developed over sixteen years, testifying to the integration of his French sources.
As a complement and counterpoint to his poetry, prose poetry, and fiction, translations of works by Charles Baudelaire and Alain Robbe-Grillet begin to make explicit the linkages in Dean Kyte’s flâneurial philosophy between the æsthetic of noir, the principles of the Nouveau Roman, and his emerging vision of Franco-Australian life.
Download a free PDF version of Dean Kyte’s critical preface to the current edition of Œuvres, in which he discusses the rôle of French in his work, and its relationship to Australian life.
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Œuvres: 2013—2023
‘The flânerie is an ambulatory intellectual parcours,’ Dean Kyte writes in his preface to Œuvres: 2013—2023. ‘It is an investigative promenade through some embodied thought.’
The second annual edition of Dean Kyte’s collected works adds more than twenty new pieces completed in his fortieth year to the decade of poetry, prose poetry, essays and fiction collated in the first edition. In draft form, some of these pieces date back to the author’s early years in Melbourne, and even to the Bellingen period of his literary life, and so their completion and inclusion in the second edition serves to round out the picture of Dean Kyte’s intellectual parcours.
While there are several new translations of pieces by Baudelaire as well as new prose poems in The Spleen of Melbourne project, by far the most radical changes to the volume lie in the realm of Dean Kyte’s ficciones. The reclassification and redivision of works from the first edition, as well as the completion of new literary crime ficciones adjacent to The Melbourne Flâneur podcast, give evidence of the greater attention paid to this strand of Dean Kyte’s œuvre in his fortieth year.
The 2023 edition also features ten pages of photographic plates. These images, taken in the course of Dean Kyte’s flâneries, provide further context to some of the prose poems in The Spleen of Melbourne as well as reveal the sources of inspiration behind the ficciones of The Melbourne Flâneur. With the addition of an illuminating new preface in which Dean Kyte sets forth a comprehensive definition of the flânerie as a literary form and its inspirational rôle in his practice, this exclusive second annual edition of Œuvres charts the ongoing parcours of Australia’s original literary stylist.
Download a free PDF version of Dean Kyte’s critical preface to the 2023 edition of Œuvres in which he sets forth his definition of the flânerie as a novel literary form.
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Œuvres: 2013—2022
Dean Kyte’s first collection of works hitherto unpublished in print gathers together writings in his many styles and tones in one volume. From poetry to fiction, to film criticism, all the genres Dean has occupied himself with in the past decade are represented in Œuvres: 2013—2022.
This exclusive volume is the intimate record of a writer’s progress towards the mastery of his craft between his thirtieth and fortieth years. It covers the end of what Dean Kyte himself regards as his years of apprenticeship and the gradual emergence of his mature, flâneurial style, a synthesis of prose and poetry that boldly integrates other languages with English.
And as an inveterate flâneur, Œuvres is also the record of Dean Kyte’s travels during those years, marking the distinct phases of his literary development from Proserpine, to Bellingen, to Melbourne.
Where the Proserpine period deals with the intimate relationship between writing and cinema in Dean Kyte’s work, the Bellingen period represents Dean’s first sustained attempt to apply his Parisian literary lifestyle philosophy of flânerie in an Australian context.
With the transition from Bellingen to Melbourne, a new stylistic confidence begins to slowly emerge, facilitated by Dean’s embodiment of the dandistic æsthetic philosophy of flânerie in Australia’s most European city.
It is then that Dean Kyte truly comes to terms with the legacy of his Bellingen years, the recognition of himself as a poet, albeit in prose. And with the prose poems of The Spleen of Melbourne and the literary crime fictions of The Melbourne Flâneur, Australia’s most unique literary voice is formed.
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