This study of Baudelaire's writings applies the principles of schizoanalysis to literary history and cultural studies. By resituating psychoanalysis in its socio-economic and cultural context, this framework provides an illuminating approach to the poetry and art criticism of the foremost French modernist. Professor Holland's book draws upon and transforms virtually the entire spectrum of recent Baudelaire scholarship and demonstrates the impact of the capitalist market and its attendant authoritarianism (as well as Baudelaire's much-discussed family circumstances) on the psychology and poetics of the writer, who abandoned his romantic idealism in favour of a modernist cynicism that has characterized modern culture ever since.