ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book combines Dolf Oehler's argument for the poet's adoption of bourgeois personae in the prose poems with Carpenter's insistence on duplicity and deflection. It shows that part of the fascination exercised by Charles Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris is its accommodation of even the most radically opposed of readings. The book discusses the collection takes its structure from five perspectives that are recurrent in criticism of Baudelaire's work and, more particularly, in criticism of the prose poems: caricature, prostitution, morality, allegory, and aesthetics. Given that imaginative identification was at the core of Baudelaire's own critical practice, it is likely that he was sensitive to mimetic reading practices. A resistance to the powerful mimetic illusion produced by Baudelaire's prose poetry permits new readings, originating in inconsistencies, contradictions, and submerged analogies, to suggest themselves.
