Baudelaire's World

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Cornell University Press, 2018 M09 5 - 288 pages

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller understanding and enjoyment of the great French poet's work.

Rosemary Lloyd considers all of Baudelaire's writing, including his criticism, theory, and letters, as well as poetry. In doing so, she sets the poems themselves in a richer context, in a landscape of real places populated with actual people. She shows how Baudelaire's poetry was marked by the influence of the writers and artists who preceded him or were his contemporaries. Lloyd builds an image of Baudelaire's world around major themes of his writing—childhood, women, reading, the city, dreams, art, nature, death. Throughout, she finds that his words and themes echo the historical and physical realities of life in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.

Lloyd also explores the possibilities and limitations of translation. As an integral part of her treatment of the life, poetry, and letters of her subject, she also reflects on published translations of Baudelaire's work and offers some of her own translations.

 

Contents

CHAPTER ONE To the Reader
1
CHAPTER TWO The Palimpsest of Memory
10
CHAPTER THREE Genius Is Childhood Recovered at Will
33
CHAPTER FOUR An Evocative Magic
52
CHAPTER FIVE Anywhere Out of the World
68
The World of Women
92
CHAPTER SEVEN Talking to Friends
114
CHAPTER EIGHT City of Dreams
138
CHAPTER TEN The Art of Transposition
188
CHAPTER ELEVEN The Old Captain Death
209
The Tip of the Iceberg
227
Bibliography of Translations
237
Selected Bibliography
239
Index of Works by Baudelaire
243
General Index
245
Copyright

CHAPTER NINE Nature the Pitiless Enchantress
165

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About the author (2018)

Rosemary Lloyd is Rudy Professor of French and Professor of Gender Studies and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is the author, editor, and translator of several books, including Shimmering in a Transformed Light: Writing the Still Life, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle, and Closer and Closer Apart: Jealousy in Literature, all from Cornell.

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