The title of Baudelaire's famed collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal, suggests the importance of flower figures for one of the major French poets of the l9th-century. Yet, until now, critics have largely overlooked the significance of flower imagery for the poetics of Baudelaire, his Romantic predecessors, contemporaries, and Symbolist successors. In this study, Philip Knight examines the general trends in poetic flower imagery, discussing the influence of popular paraliterature's idealization of flowers, and finally arguing that flower figures became the one indispensable emblem of both continuity and change for the poets of the time.
This book studies the various definitions of animal nature proposed by nineteenth-century currents of thought in France. It is based on an examination of a number of key thinkers and writers, some well known (for example, Michelet and Lamartine), others largely forgotten (for example, Gleizes and Reynaud). At the centre of the book lies the idea that knowledge of animals is often knowledge of something else, that the primary referentiality is overlaid with additional levels of meaning. In nineteenth-century France thinking about animals (their future and their past) became a way of thinking about power relations in society, for example about the status of women and the problem of the labouring classes. This book analyses how animals as symbols externalize and mythologize human fears and wishes, but it also demonstrates that animals have an existence in and for themselves and are not simply useful counters functioning within discourse.
This volume adopts a varied approach to the study of the 'material world' in the French literature, thought and visual arts of the 19th century. Contributors look not only at the Romantic and Realist transcendence of the Neo-classical heritage of abstraction and idealism, but also adopt modern critical perspectives to analyse central themes such as urbanisation, fetishism and the representation of the female body.
Tristan Corbière is often viewed as the archetypal poète maudit, a misunderstood rebel and bohemian prankster. This is a study of the poet's innovative use of language. It uses the critical tool of irony to analyse his idiosyncratic verse, showing how he contributed to the general revolution in poetic language that marked the 1870s in France. Corbière's poetry pushed the ironic element in Baudelaire to its limit and exerted an important influence on Laforgue, Pound, and Eliot. It played a key role in the ironic tradition of Symbolism which is often overshadowed by the 'pure' poetry of contemporaries like Mallarmé. Using close textual readings of poems from Les Amours jaunes (1873), the only collection published in Corbière's lifetime, this book outlines a method of reading his self-contradictory verse. It tackles the difficulty of interpreting ironic discourse and demonstrates how irony operates in Les Amours jaunes at all levels from verbal device to world-view, showing how the doubts of modern man and the spiritual void of commodity culture shape the very language of his poetry. Synthesizing critical approaches from continental and Anglo-American traditions, it analyses his use of puns, oral diction, dialogue, quotation, and intertextuality. It shows how he systematically undercuts habitual strategies of reading, by importing novelistic techniques into verse to deride it from within, and by ironizing irony itself. This is an introduction to the work of a challenging poet and a study of the practice of reading French verse.
This catalogue accompanies exhibitions at the following museums: Dallas Museum of Art, October 26, 2014-February 8, 2015; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, March 21-June 21, 2015; Denver Art Museum, July 19-October 11, 2015.
"Perhaps the most difficult task in undertaking a study of nineteenth-century French poetry would be the selection of poets to study: who among us would care to choose only one from among Mallarme, Vigny, Hugo - and literally dozens of others - who so thoroughly and powerfully interpreted, shaped, and challenged the art forever more? Author Michael Bishop, charged with that forbidding duty, has concentrated his study on ten central figures of that century: Desbordes-Valmore, Lamartine, Vigny, Baudelaire, Hugo, Mallarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Lautreamont. And while the list of subjects is compact, Bishop's intense critical and personal analysis of th ese extraordinary giants is astounding. Not only has he delved deeply into the complex structure of each of these ten poetic oeuvres, but in so doing has introduced to the discussion a number of those poets seemingly excluded from the book. Indeed, his thoughts on Nerval, Gautier, and others are frequently as perspicacious and comprehensive as those put forth in works devoted solely to those poets." "In examining the clearest and most distinct voices of nineteenth-century French poetry, Bishop has shrewdly probed a tradition, come to terms with modern criticisms, imparted truly fresh details of coherence resulting from intimate and informed readings, and joined hands across the ages - all the while preserving (and occasionally solidifying) the exquisite, individual integrity of particular oeuvres. As he canvasses the charm and strength of Desbordes-Valmore's unaltered passion, Baudelaire's unsurpassed powers of versification, the stunning descriptive-narrative specificity of Hugo's lexicon, or the interplay of fiction and reality in Mallarme, Bishop constantly reflects the teeming fascinations and elan of the poets themselves."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This volume of essays, written by scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, presents a fresh approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry. Each of the eleven essays, on different poets from Lamartine to Mallarmé and Laforgue, focuses on the detailed organisation of a single poem. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the 'basics' of poetic language (sound, metre, syntax, etc.), and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in the prevailing literary theory. Theoretical positions are posed and tested in the terms of practical analysis and interpretation. Christopher Prendergast's introduction to the volume situates the essays in a series of general perspectives and contexts, and Clive Scott has provided an appendix on French versification.
How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and Rene Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist ages, in order to suggest a lineage of this curious aesthetic and to cast light on the functions of the visual and of the verbal in evoking it.
Poet, visionary, short-story writer and autobiographer, Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855) explored the uncertain borderlines between dream and reality, irony and madness, autobiography and fiction with his groundbreaking writings. This comprehensive selection of his works includes 'Aurélia', the memoir of his madness; the haunting novella of love and memory 'Sylvie' (considered to be a masterpiece by Proust); the hermetic sonnets of 'The Chimeras'; as well as Nerval's experimental fictions and selections from his correspondence, which demonstrate his lucid awareness of how nineteenth-century psychiatry consigned his fertile imagination to the status of mental illness. Together these pieces confirm Nerval's place as a pioneering modernist, a precursor of the French Symbolists and a vital model for such writers as Marcel Proust, André Breton, Antonin Artaud and Michel Leiris.
