Charlie Louth
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198813231
- eISBN:
- 9780191893377
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198813231.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Baudelaire forms the link onto this chapter on Rilke’s ‘prose-book’, where his experience of Paris is given fullest expression and where the French literary tradition is everywhere present. Malte is ...
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Baudelaire forms the link onto this chapter on Rilke’s ‘prose-book’, where his experience of Paris is given fullest expression and where the French literary tradition is everywhere present. Malte is read as in dialogue with decadence, especially with Huysmans’ À rebours. It is understood as a ‘poet’s novel’ in the sense that its techniques, preoccupations, and structures are not those of the novel as they are commonly understood, and make more sense when approached as a kind of prose poetry with connections to Baudelaire’s. There is also an extended comparison with Hamlet, as a way of elucidating the novel as a work of crisis, with its hero poised between ruin and revelation.Less
Baudelaire forms the link onto this chapter on Rilke’s ‘prose-book’, where his experience of Paris is given fullest expression and where the French literary tradition is everywhere present. Malte is read as in dialogue with decadence, especially with Huysmans’ À rebours. It is understood as a ‘poet’s novel’ in the sense that its techniques, preoccupations, and structures are not those of the novel as they are commonly understood, and make more sense when approached as a kind of prose poetry with connections to Baudelaire’s. There is also an extended comparison with Hamlet, as a way of elucidating the novel as a work of crisis, with its hero poised between ruin and revelation.
