A01=Virginia E. Swain
Aesthetics of Modernity
Allegorical
Author_Virginia E. Swain
Baudelaire
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
Cultural Revisions
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_non-fiction
French Literature
Grotesque Figures
Johns Hopkins University Press
Literary Criticism
Parallax Series
Personification
Poeme du hachisch
Prose Poems
Rousseau
Virginia E. Swain
Product details
- ISBN 9780801879456
- Weight: 522g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Dec 2004
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Charles Baudelaire is usually read as a paradigmatically modern poet, whose work ushered in a new era of French literature. But the common emphasis on his use of new forms and styles overlooks the complex role of the past in his work. In Grotesque Figures, Virginia E. Swain explores how the specter of the eighteenth century made itself felt in Baudelaire's modern poetry in the pervasive textual and figural presence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Not only do Rousseau's ideas inform Baudelaire's theory of the grotesque, but Rousseau makes numerous appearances in Baudelaire's poetry as a caricature or type representing the hold of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution over Baudelaire and his contemporaries. As a character in "Le Poeme du hashisch" and the Petits Poemes en prose, "Rousseau" gives the grotesque a human form. Swain's literary, cultural, and historical analysis deepens our understanding of Baudelaire and of nineteenth-century aesthetics by relating Baudelaire's poetic theory and practice to Enlightenment debates about allegory and the grotesque in the arts.
Offering a novel reading of Baudelaire's ambivalent engagement with the eighteenth-century, Grotesque Figures examines nineteenth-century ideological debates over French identity, Rousseau's political and artistic legacy, the aesthetic and political significance of the rococo, and the presence of the grotesque in the modern.
Virginia E. Swain is professor of French at Dartmouth College.
