Before he had turned 21, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) upended the house of French poetry and left it in shambles. What makes Rimbaud’s poetry important, argues Seth Whidden, is part of what makes his life so compelling: rebellion, audacity, creativity and exploration.Almost all of Rimbaud’s poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Against the backdrop of the crumbling Second Empire and the tumultuous Paris Commune, the poet took centuries-old traditions of French ver...

Through its readings of Charles Baudelaire's collection Le Spleen de Paris and other prose poems from the nineteenth century, this book considers the practice of reading prose poetry and how it might be different from reading poetry in verse. Among the numerous factors that helped shape the nascent modernity in Baudelaire's poetic prose are the poems' themes, forms, linguistic qualities, and modes. The contradictions identifiable at the level of prose poetry's discourse are simila...

By the 1850s, the expansion of printing and distribution technologies provided writers with more readers and literary outlets than ever before, while the ever-changing political contexts occasioned by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 brought about differing degrees of political, social, and literary censure and pressure. Seth Whidden examines crises of literary authority in nineteenth-century French literature, both in response to the attempts of the Second Empire (1852-1870) to restore th...

When blacksmith Pierre Michaux affixed pedals to the front axle of a two-wheeled scooter with a seat, he helped kick off a craze known as velocipedomania, which swept France in the late 1860s. The immediate forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede similarly reflected changing cultural attitudes and challenged gender norms.Velocipedomania is the first in-depth study of the velocipede fad and the popular culture it inspired. It explores how the device was hailed as...

Contributing to the current lively discussion of collaboration in French letters, this collection raises fundamental questions about the limits and definition of authorship in the context of the nineteenth century's explosion of collaborative ventures. While the model of the stable single author that prevailed during the Romantic period dominates the beginning of the century, the authority of the speaking subject is increasingly in crisis through the century's political and social upheaval...