Grotesque Figures

<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-century, <i>Grotesque Figures</i> 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.</p>