Baudelaire's Shadow - (Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory) by Nathan Brown

About the Book

Traces the connection between poetic content and form in the contradictory logic of determination that permeates Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil.

Book Synopsis

Baudelaire's fame and notoriety have been established by the reduction of his complex work to simplified profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, of corporeal decay . . . But what is it that holds these facets of the work together? Is there a logic underpinning the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while suturing content and form?

Baudelaire's Shadow argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire's poetic project is the problem of determination: a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier.

With philosophical precision and poetic élan, one of Baudelaire's finest translators reconstructs what we thought we knew about The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, revealing the dialectical logic at the heart of this major work of modern literature.

Review Quotes

In the most philosophically serious engagement with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal that we have, Nathan Brown takes on the mysteries of poetic existence and of poetic determination with rich, surprising readings of such poems as 'Les Sept Vieillards, ' 'Obsession, ' 'Un Voyage à Cythère, ' and 'Les Petites Vieilles.' An unusually stirring and eloquent tour de force.---Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

With a kind of omniscient curiosity, Nathan Brown probes so deeply into the metaphysical bestiary of Les Fleurs du Mal that he can emerge from its cavernous depths with an armload of dripping seaweed named Kant. Wonders never cease in this sumptuous, even clairvoyant, examination---Jed Rasula, University of Georgia

About the Author

Nathan Brown is Professor of English at Concordia University, Montréal, where he is founding director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the translator of Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil (Verso, 2025) and the author of Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham, 2021) and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017).