Cloud Imagery in Baudelaire: From Toxicity to Ecological Imagination

Mengdi Li

Abstract


This ecocritical analysis of Baudelaire’s The Spleen of Paris examines cloud imagery through three lenses: its symbolic meaning in the urban environment, its role in conveying toxic discourses, and its representation of an idealized natural state. Clouds, as natural symbols, reflect the tension between nature and the industrialized city, evoke complex emotions, and reveal the erosion of human-nature connections. Moreover, they symbolize pollution, social alienation, and the yearning for a harmonious natural world. This analysis enriches our understanding of Baudelaire’s ecological philosophy and offers new perspectives for ecocritical research.

 


Keywords


Charles Baudelaire; The Spleen of Paris; Cloud imagery; Ecocriticism; Toxic discourse; Environmental imagination

Full Text:

PDF

References


Glotfelty, C., & Fromm, H. (1996). The ecocriticism reader: Landmarks in literary ecology. Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press.

Buell, L. (2001). Writing for an endangered world: Literature, culture, and environment in the U.S. and beyond. Cambridge, MA & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Zimmerman, M. E., Callicott, J. B., Sessions, G., Warren, K., & Clarke, J. (1998). Environmental philosophy: From animal rights to radical ecology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Marder, M. (2014). The philosopher’s plant: An intellectual herbarium. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Baudelaire, C. (2016). Le spleen de Paris. Paris: Flammarion.

Baudelaire, C. (1958). Petits poèmes en prose. Paris: Classiques Garnier.

Baudelaire, C. (1973). Correspondances. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13744

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2025 Studies in Literature and Language

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard

Please send your manuscripts to sll@cscanada.net，or  sll@cscanada.org  for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture