TY - JOUR
AB - 128 RE VI E W S KERR,GREG. Dream Cities: Urban Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Legenda, 2013. 260 pp. £45.00. ISBN 978 –1 –907975 –53 –0. This work is a fascinating study of the ways in which the modern metropolis altered not only the content, but also the formal innovations of several nineteenth-century French writers, specifically in the genre of the prose poem. The book illustrates a previously understated relationship between utopian thinking and the prose poem as a formal genre. The introduction, rich in detailed readings of both utopian thinkers and literary scholars, provides the reader with the concepts being discussed; four detailed chapters follow, on different incarnations of the prose poem as defined by Kerr. Chapter 1 deals with the writings of Saint-Simonianism and its suggestiveness for the later prose poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Chapter 2 deals with the ‘formal poetic potentialities’ present in The ´ophile Gautier’s journalism. The final two chapters focus on Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and Rimbaud’s Illuminations, two of the best-known collections of prose poems ever produced. This work is an innovative and valuable contribution to both urban and literary studies and presents important ways 
TI - Kerr, Greg. Dream Cities: Urban Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Legenda, 2013. 260 pp. £45.00. ISBN 978–1–907975–53–0
JF - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqt055
DA - 2014-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/kerr-greg-dream-cities-urban-utopia-and-prose-by-poets-in-nineteenth-D6SdqaZLz3
SP - 128
EP - 128
VL - 50
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -