num_pages: 320
description: 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, hisRomantic 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 indispensableemblem of both continuity and change for the poets of the time.
language: English
title: Flower Poetics in Nineteenth Century France
titlecomplete: Flower Poetics in Nineteenth Century France (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs)
publisher: Oxford University Press