Baudelaire and Intertextuality: Poetry at the Crossroads

In this reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris Margery Evans proposes that Baudelaire's text serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable. She shows how the text probes the fundamental tension between individuality and conformity, powerfully symbolized by the giant metropolis. Dr. Evans explores the interconnections among the prose poems that make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to literary theory as a whole.