Baudelaire's Objects

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Professor Joseph Acquisto (Chair, Dept. of Romance Languages and Linguistics, University of Vermont, USA)

Baudelaire's Objects

Name: Baudelaire's Objects
Price: 180 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9798765150825

Professor Joseph Acquisto (Chair, Dept. of Romance Languages and Linguistics, University of Vermont, USA)

$180

Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
16 April 2026

Literary theory; Literary studies: poetry & poets; Philosophy: aesthetics

Examines Baudelaire’s multifaceted use of natural, domestic, urban, and esthetic objects in his verse and prose poetry, as well as the ways his poems reshape our understanding of objects and how those objects destabilize, yet preserve, the subject-object relation.

Charles Baudelaire’s representation of objects in the natural world establishes a relation that is neither one of identity between human subject and nature nor a relation of domination; he reveals both the natural world and the human subject to be characterized by an irreducible doubleness and nonidentity to itself. Likewise, everyday domestic objects in his poems overflow their boundaries as simple metaphors; their often uncanny aspect highlights their quasi-agency as they define and shape the subject who interacts with them.

Baudelaire’s poems-as-objects also take on this kind of agency, acting upon readers in ways that both require and surpass attempts to grasp the poems conceptually as art objects for analysis. This reshaping of subjectivity and objectivity acquires increased intensity in his urban poetry, where city objects are at the intersection of the mythic, the historical, the esthetic, and the commercial.

Baudelaire’s Objects shows how paying attention to objects differently, as Baudelaire’s poems impel readers to do, is to reorient ourselves in the world by giving objects their due, recognizing the mediating qualities both of objects and of the language with which we represent or create them. We can thus reinvent our understanding of the limits and potential of human subjectivity as it is inextricably intertwined with the world around us.

By: Professor Joseph Acquisto (Chair Dept. of Romance Languages and Linguistics University of Vermont USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 154mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 460g
ISBN: 9798765150825
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 16 April 2026
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset (Bloomsbury, 2024), Reading Baudelaire with Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2023), Living Well with Pessimism in Nineteenth-Century France (2021), Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury, 2019), and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Reviews for Baudelaire's Objects

In probing how Baudelaire's poetry situates us in a field of relations that are infinitely more complex, nuanced, and impactful than that of subject-object dichotomy, Acquisto's incisive study brings to light poetry's transformative power that has us ceaselessly become with the world. * Claire Lyu, Associate Professor of French, University of Virginia, USA *