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 Grotesque Figures, 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 "Le Poème du hashisch" and
the Petits Poèmes en prose, "Rousseau" gives the grotesque a human
form.
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, Grotesque Figures 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.