This remarkable book provides a new and detailed reading of the entire corpus of Baudelaire (1821-67): Les Fleurs du Mal, Le Spleen de Paris, and his critical essays on literature and the creative arts. It is an invitation to return to the text, to discover or rediscover a writer too often categorized as an apolitical dandy burdened by melancholia and dedicated to the pursuit of art for art's sake.
Roger Pearson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford. His research is focused on French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His publications include monographs on Stendhal, Voltaire, and Mallarmé, a biography of Voltaire, and translations of Voltaire, Zola, and Maupassant. His previous book, Unacknowledged Legislators: The Poet as Lawgiver in Post-Revolutionary
France (2016), was awarded the R. Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.