Understanding Les fleurs du mal : critical readings /

This useful and interesting book collects essays by 16 professors of French or comparative literature, 14 of them affiliated with American universities. By the design of the editor (Univ. of Memphis), himself one of the essayists, each of the contributors selected a single Baudelaire poem on which to comment, and diverse critical approaches have been employed. Happily, the majority of the articles are insightful, well written, and relatively free of annoying specialist jargon. They are therefore available to serious undergraduate students, and they are substantial enough in content to satisfy graduate students and Baudelaire scholars. One warning, though: one must have a decent reading knowledge of French to derive most benefit from these essays, since nothing in French is translated--neither the Baudelaire poems nor the numerous citations from critical works. This is a book intentionally by and for US Francophiles and Francophones. And yet Baudelaire is now a figure in world literature, and many US students and scholars with little French know and care about his work. This book suits its purposes admirably, but it does largely bypass such readers. J. D. McGowan; Illinois Wesleyan University