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Grotesque figures : Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the aesthetics of modernity by Baudelaire, Charles;Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;Swain, Virginia E is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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<P>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 <I>Grotesque Figures</I>, 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 <I>"Le Poème du hashisch"</I> and the <I>Petits Poèmes en prose</I>, "Rousseau" gives the grotesque a human form.</P><P>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-ce

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Author

Baudelaire, Charles;Rousseau, Jean-Jacques;Swain, Virginia E

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press

Published

2005

Language

EN

ISBN

9781421427683

Category

nonfiction