Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Socio-Poetics of Modernism

This new study of Baudelaire’s writings is the first book to apply the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides a new and illuminating approach to the poetry and art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor Holland’s book draws upon and transforms virtually the entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship, and demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and its attendant authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire’s much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has characterised modern culture ever since.