Author(s)

Yuxuan Gao ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Literature, Journalism and Communication, Qingdao University, Qingdao, 266071, China

Corresponding Author

Yuxuan Gao

ABSTRACT

"Ugliness" is an aesthetic category for discordant things, and an important way to see the world. Poet Baudelaire turned his attention to the world of "ugliness", depicting it, praising it and celebrating it, putting it on the same level as beauty, and daring readers to face it directly. In The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire shows his exploration of ugliness from two dimensions: environment and image. He turns his attention to the crumbling Paris after the miserable life of the underclass and praises the "greatness" of Satan. Beggars, prostitutes, drunkards and gamblers, all of whom were previously reviled in literature, become the objects of Baudelaire's profound analysis. Baudelaire tries to excavate beauty from these ugly phenomena, opening the door of aesthetics to the examination of ugliness.

KEYWORDS

Baudelaire; The Flower of Evil; ugly imagery; aesthetic ugliness

CITE THIS PAPER

Yuxuan Gao, The Ugly Qualities in Baudelaire's the Flowers of Evil. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 64-70. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.061210.

REFERENCES

[1] Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists (trans. by P. E. Charvet), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 267, 1972. 
[2] Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (trans. by S. Emanuel). Standford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 64, 1992. 
[3] Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (trans. by J. McGowan). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 
[4] Beibei Guan; Jian Xie, "Morality and Evil in Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evi". English Language and Literature Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 73-78, 2017. 
[5] Dessoir, Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Wayne: Wayne State University Press, p. 169, 1970.

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