Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony.(Review) (book review)

Journal of European Studies, December, 2000 by SCOTT, CLIVE

Baudelaire's Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony. By Sonya Stephens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xii 181. [pound]35.00.

The first chapter of this relatively short but richly suggestive and multifarious assault on Baudelaire's prose poems is devoted to the dedicatory letter addressed to Houssaye. It tenaciously examines a communication at once duplicitous in its opportunism and multi-layered in its function: 'It is, in other words, a prose poem on the prose poem which provides a commentary on the title and the dedicatory act and, in form and function, speaks of genre' (p. 15). The dysfunctional communication which this letter is, leaks into the prose poems themselves as does its insidious disequilibriation of known discursive...

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