A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse and prose poems. This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity.

Cheryl Krueger is associate professor of French at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Art of Procrastination: Baudelaire's Poetry in Prose and coauthor of Tâches d'encre and Mise-en-scène: Cinéma et lecture. Her articles on French literature, film, and cultural studies have appeared in a variety of journals. Her current book project treats the culture and poetics of olfaction and perfume in nineteenth-century France.