With the exception of the concluding interview, ‘August Strindberg on Himself’, which serves as an afterword to this selection, the majority of the essays published here come from two phases of Strindberg's career as a writer. They are also directly related to the two periods during which he produced his major achievements as a dramatist. Thus, the Vivisections of 1887 explores many of the themes and issues on which he focuses in the masterpieces of psychological naturalism, The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), Creditors (1888) and the series of short plays that he wrote between 1888 and 1892, while the later volume of Vivisections from 1894, the selection from Jardin des Plantes (1896) and the other pieces from the 1890s all testify to the spectacular intellectual and emotional process that Strindberg underwent during this period, which would in due course enable him to write several of the key works of modernist dramaturgy, beginning in 1898 with the first two parts of To Damascus.

None of these collections is translated here in its entirety. The 1887 Vivisections also contains a brief causerie entitled ‘Hallucinations’, two complementary à clefaccounts of painters, ‘The Small’ and ‘The Great’, in which the fortunes of two of Strindberg's acquaintances, Carl Skånberg and Ernst Josephson, are imperfectly masked as representative destinies in the artistic world of the period, and the novella, ‘Short Cuts’, a study in hysteria which bears comparison with numerous other contemporary fictional anatomies of the female psyche by (among others) the Goncourt brothers and Ibsen or, perhaps more pertinently, given its original publication in Vienna, in 1887, with what is now recognised to have been Freud and Breuer's epoch-making Studies on Hysteria of the following decade.