Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France

This volume of essays focuses on how poets approach reading as a notion and a practice that both inform their writing and their relationship to their readers. The 19th century saw a broadened and increasingly self-conscious concern with reading as an interpretive and political act, with significant implications for poets' individual practice, which they often forged in dialogue with other poets and artists of the time. Covering the 1830s to the late 1990s, a period rich in poetic innovation, the essays examine a wide range of authors and their diverse approaches to reading as inscribed in - and related to - creative writing, and articulate the many ways in which reading developed as an active engagement key to the critical thought that drove poetic creation at the dawn of aesthetic modernity.