Abstract

CAMPORA, Magdalena. Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire, a Material History. Prismas [online]. 2019, vol.23, n.1, pp.11-31. ISSN 1852-0499.

What did the mise en livre and the publishing of his poems mean to Baudelaire? How did the different formats in which the poems circulated (newspapers, letters, books, legal documents) and their social, political and legal contexts affect the autonomous logic at work in the text we call Les Fleurs du Mal? One hundred and sixty years after the book’s first publication, this article analyses the impact that the media and editorial regime post 1830 had in the configuration of the text. In order to do this, I will study how different agents -censors, journalists, editors, literary executors- indirectly altered Baudelaire’s initial plan, as well as the effects that market policies, editorial conditions and legal frameworks had in the formal structure of the text. Following Baudelaire’s own comparison of his book with a mutating body, my work seeks to configure a “Biography” or material history of Les Fleurs du Mal that examines how the text responded to external intervention, as well as the legitimating strategies the poet chose, to deal with the unexpected effects that publishing had on his writing.

Keywords : Book materiality; Publishing; Law and Literature; Structure of Les Fleurs du Mal.

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