Baudelaire and Intertextuality

This new reading of Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris is a response to Baudelaire's own challenge to read his text as one in which 'everything ... is head and tail, alternately and reciprocally'. Margery Evans proposes that Le Spleen de Paris serves to question the conventions of prose forms such as the novel and the moral fable, problematising such conventions as the unitary narrator, the extended plot and the artifice of beginnings and endings, and making use of intertextual parody and ironic inversion. Baudelaire's text probes the relationship between individuality and conformity to pre-existing codes, both in literature and in the world, explicitly re-writing a traditional philosophical topos which contrasts mankind's reclusive and sociable impulses. The giant metropolis provides a symbol of that drama. Dr Evans explores the interconnections between the prose poems which make up Le Spleen de Paris and their intertextual relations with other, mostly prose, works, and shows how this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of general relevance to narratology.