Mis Reading The Creative Impulse

Building on work by Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, and Harold Bloom, Adrianna M. Paliyenko s richly textured study revises our previous understanding of Arthur Rimbaud s (18541891) indirect artistic influence on Paul Claudel (18681955). Paliyenko s analysis answers to critical readings that rely on speculative spiritual affinities and text-surface similarities in identifying Claudel as Rimbaud s artistic follower. She traces the two writers development of the poetic subject, striving to map Claudel s "creative corrections," or revisions, of Rimbaud s work. In redirecting discussion of Rimbaud s work, she develops a Bloomian paradigm of how creative artists strive for originality by correcting or revising their predecessors."

In 1857 the trials of Flaubert and Baudelaire for offending against religion and public morality drew attention to the features we now associate with literary modernism; but instead of winning praise for their innovations they were indicted for "ideological crimes." With the passage of time the offenses have been forgotten and the innovations inserted into a triumphal narrative about the rise of modernism. Far from manifesting the autonomy proclaimed by modernism's defenders, though, Flaubert's and Baudelaire's works remain enmeshed in their socio-historical contexts. To that end, The Censorship Effect argues that the stylistic features that prompted the criminal indictment of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du Mal--Flaubert's free indirect style and Baudelaire's multiple poetic personae--were much more the products of an intense struggle with a culture of censorship than they were hallmarks of autonomous or autoreferential works of art. They exhibit signs of self-censorship and collaboration with a regime of ethical and political censorship that not only shaped their very composition but affected their reception and continues to operate in the field of literary criticism. Indeed, as William Olmsted compellingly demonstrates, French modernism begins and remains deeply embedded in a culture of censorship whose proprieties, both literary and social, Baudelaire and Flaubert nevertheless challenged and transgressed. Exploring the censorship effect as it played out for Baudelaire and Flaubert, from their trials to their monuments, The Censorship Effect recaptures some sense of their original anger as well as its ongoing suppression by new orthodoxies and reveals how the effect of censorship has implications beyond Flaubert and Baudelaire, beyond authors, but for us as readers too.

The Facts On File Companion to World Poetry : 1900 to the Present is a comprehensive introduction to 20th and 21st-century world poets and their most famous, most distinctive, and most influential poems.

In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and literary historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how these female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered considerable recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas. This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception. The result is an encounter with the texts of celebrated writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann. Glimpses at the different stages of each poet’s career show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gender specific, thus advocating for their rightful place in the canon. A prodigious contribution to studies of nineteenth-century French poetry, Paliyenko’s book reexamines the reception of poetry by women within and beyond its original context. This balanced and comprehensive treatment of their work uncovers the multiple ways in which women poets sought to define their place in history.

Contributors are Susan Bordo, Stanley Clarke, Erica Harth, Leslie Heywood, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, Mario Moussa, Eileen O'Neill, Adrianna Paliyenko, Ruth Perry, Mario S&áenz, Karl Stern, Thomas Wartenberg, and James Winders.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Arthur Rimbaud, the volatile genius of French poetry, invented a language that captured the energy and visual complexity of the modern world. This book explores some of the technical aspects of this language in relation to the new techniques brought forth by the Impressionist painters such as Monet, Morisot, and Pissarro.

Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud considers how the crisis of the lyric subject in the middle of the nineteenth century in France is a direct response to the aesthetic principles of Parnassian poetry, which dominated the second half of the century much more than critics often think. The poets considered here rebel against the strict confines of traditional and contemporary poetry and attempt to create radically new discursive practices. Specifically, the close readings of poems apply recent studies of subjectivity in poetry and focus on the works of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to see how each subverts the dominant tradition of French poetry in a unique way. Whereas previous studies considered isolated aspects of each poet’s lyric subject, Leaving Parnassus shows that the situation of the lyric is a source of subversion throughout the poets’ entire work, and as such it is crucial to our full understanding of their respective innovations.

One of the defining features of modernism lies in its far-reaching rethinking of the relation between the human and the non-human. In the present volume, this crucial aspect of modernism’s legacy is investigated from an authentically transnational perspective, taking an innovative stance on a diverse range of authors – from posthumanist classics such as Beckett and Woolf to Valentine de Saint-Point, Radoje Domanovic and Aldo Palazzeschi among others. On the one hand, this collection sheds new light on the modernist contribution to posthumanism, providing a valuable reference point for future studies on the topic. On the other, it offers a new take on the transnational dimension of modernism, highlighting unexplored convergences between modernist authors from several different national contexts.