Francoise Meltzer

Work is both wide-ranging and bracingly interdisciplinary, as her double titles suggest. She published theoretically informed studies of ekphrasis and literary representation, of imitation and plagiarism, of Joan of Arc, and of the poetry of Baudelaire. The Baudelaire book is a refreshingly revisionist consideration of his poetry, demonstrating the multiple ways in which the poems in their very richness are divided against themselves, and combining a subtle sense of historical context with illuminating close readings. Current work includes: a study of France in the historically pivotal year 1848, an investigation of how subjectivity is gendered, and a consideration of a set of photographic representations of the devastation of Europe in the aftermath of World War II.