Society for French Studies

The Society for French Studies is delighted to announce the award of the seventh annual R. H. Gapper Book Prize to Maria C. Scott for her book Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’: Shifting Perspectives, published by Ashgate.

Maria Scott’s book is one of only a few that have explored Baudelaire’s late work, Le Spleen de Paris. In analysing the operation of irony in Le Spleen de Paris, Dr Scott argues that the joke is ultimately on the reader: to recognize irony is to participate in a process that is governed by a perplexing and manipulative duplicity. One effect is to lay traps for the bourgeois reader, whose superiority Baudelaire seems to concede, but whom he also mocks. Yet the impact on the reader of today is no less unsettling: through a series of deft and original close readings of these highly ambiguous texts, Dr Scott undertakes a far-reaching reappraisal both of Baudelaire’s aesthetics and of the critical procedures through which we grapple with him. Her book will have a decisive impact on the study of the later Baudelaire and shows also how so seemingly hackneyed a resource as irony can still impart an unexpected dynamism to the act of reading.

Maria Scott is Lecturer in French in the National University of Ireland, Galway. She was previously awarded a Government of Ireland Research Fellowship by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences and is at present working on Stendhal’s heroines.

The award, which is for the best book published in 2005 by a scholar working in Britain or Ireland in French studies, was made by the Editors of the journal French Studies, Professor Michael Freeman and Professor Patrick O’Donovan, together with Mr Richard Gapper, representing the R. H. Gapper Charitable Trust.

Please note: Special discount to all French Studies members. Purchase Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris quoting the code SC2001 and receive a 25% discount until 30th November 2007. Please contact: Bookpoint Limited, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon. OX14 4SB, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1235 827730 Fax: +44 (0)1235 400454 E-mail: ashgate@bookpoint.co.uk

R.H Gapper Book Prize

Further details available here