Abstract EN:

In this dissertation I study the poetry of two of the nineteenth century's more important authors, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, in order to show how their formulation of a utopian literary practice can serve as a model for understanding the complex interactions between literature and society. I contend that authors like Baudelaire and Mallarmé no longer 'show' utopia; instead, they attempt to 'produce' it through the creation of a revolutionary kind of poetic language. While this essentially theoretical approach examines something like the discursive logic of the utopian from a twenty-first-century perspective, it does so by building on a historical reading of nineteenth-century utopian practice. In the introductory stages of my work, I show how representations of utopia in pre-Revolutionary French literature were fantasies about social possibilities. Because utopia was never some distant island (not even in Thomas More's 1516 eponymous novel) but rather a sophisticated metaphor for existing society, the 'space' utopia occupied and defined was that of literary discourse itself. In the nineteenth century, however, two factors conspired to alter the nature and objectives of utopian practice: (1) technological advances brought on by the Industrial Revolution; and (2) the political void left by the collapse of the French monarchy. Together these elements made many citizens of this emerging but still undefined social order believe that true utopia was imminent. Utopian movements flourished. The great expectations they engendered became the ideological catalysts for the litany of revolutions that define the century. While the impact of utopian thought on nineteenth-century French politics is well documented, no significant scholarly work to date has investigated the rich interplay between utopia, literary production and society. I argue this is because the subject is embroiled in one of the great paradoxes of nineteenth-century literature. For the closer society thought itself to utopia the more superfluous abstract literary fantasies of the social sphere became. By mid-century, however, these utopian social movements begin to disintegrate under the weight of their untenable dreams. It is at this point, I contend, that utopia resurfaces in the literary, but in entirely new and unexpected ways - in the formulation of a dystopian literary model in Baudelaire's "Pauvre Belgique" and in the fetishisation of female bodies in Mallarmé's poetry to name two examples. If literary scholars have generally ignored the significance of this fundamental shift in utopian literary practice, it is, I contend, because most have viewed the fields it affects as distinctly autonomous. Utopian literature has been perceived either as a social-political problem or as an aesthetic-literary problem but not as both. On one hand, sociological readings of the era tend to concentrate solely on the causal association between literary production and the introduction of market forces in French publishing circles. . .