Mallarmé's children

by Richard Cándida Smith

"In a narrative combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme, the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. Through the lens of symbolism, Candida Smith focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarme's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result."--BOOK JACKET.