Baudelaire and intertextuality : poetry at the crossroads

This 1993 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 unitary narrator, the extended plot, and the artifice of beginnings and endings. She shows how Baudelaire's text probes the relationship between individuality and conformity to pre-existing codes, both in literature and in the world, and how 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 argues that this anomalous, hybrid work raises far-reaching questions of relevance to narratology and to literary theory as a whole.