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Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse lite...
In a new interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry--in France and elsewhere--James Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art. A drama emerges in Lawler's urbane and resourceful reading. The thinking, feeling, acting Drunken Boat is an early theatrical projection of the poet's self; the Inventor, the Memorialist, and the Ing nu assume distinct roles in his later verse. It is, however, in Illuminations and Une Saison en enfer that Rimbaud enacts most powerfully his grandiose dreams. Here the poet becomes Self Creator, Self-Critic, Self-Ironist; he takes the parts of Floodmaker, Oriental Storyteller, Dreamer, Lover; and he recounts his descent into Hell in the guise of a Confessor. In delineating and exploring the poet's "theatre of the self" Lawler shows us the tragic lucidity and the dramatic coherence of Rimbaud's work.
This book establishes the role of French writer Charles Baudelaire in the formation of paradigms of modernity in Italian poetry between 1857, the year of publication of Baudelaire’s highly influential collection Les Fleurs du Mal, and 1912, when the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi, was published in Milan. It focuses primarily on Baudelaire’s influence on the poetry of the Scapigliatura, a long-underrated movement which in the 1860s introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-garde. This monograph also investigates Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s interrelated impacts on early Futurist poetry, demonstrating that Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura for inspiration on themes that were considered as distinctly unpoetic – and therefore modern – such as medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, and abnormal sensuality.
Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are similarly perceptible in other aspects of Baudelaire's poetic language, beyond the discursive: in the poems' formal considerations, which retain recognisable traces of verse despite their prose presentation; and, with res...
Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient; in America, which he had never visited, dogs don't bark, birds don't sing, and—by extension—humans are weaker, less intelligent, and less potent. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by these claims, brought a seven-foot-tall carcass of a moose from America to the entry hall of his Parisian hotel, but the five-foot-tall Buffon remained unimpressed and refused to change his views on America's inferiority. Buffon, as Philippe Roger demonstrates here, was just one of the first in a long line of Frenchmen who have built a history of anti-Americanism i...
Through an analysis of political, art historical, and literary discourse, this book considers French fascination with the Gothic cathedral.
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Best understood in terms of a Dionysian aesthetics, her work is sensual, erotic, and playful, but also reflective, violent on occasion, and always marked by a tragic under-current that becomes magnified with time. Beyond the prominent place she held in the world of French letters, Noailles' lifelong commitment to artistic creation invites a reconsideration of her work."--BOOK JACKET.
These essays on the problems and functions of biography - particularly those of writers, thinkers and artists - investigate a subject of enduring importance for those interested in culture.
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