The Land of Lost Content explores the ways in which nineteenth-century French writers represented childhood and children in their work. Ranging widely through poetry, fiction, autobiographies, and letters, Rosemary Lloyd shows how writers as diverse as Baudelaire and Hector Malot, George Sand and Pierre Loti, Flaubert and Judith Gautier, gradually responded to changing concepts of the self. After a study of the problems and motifs which recur in autobiography,...

Undeniably one of the modern world's greatest literary figures, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) left behind a correspondence documenting in intimate detail a life as intense in its extremes as his poetry. This extensive selection of his letters -- many translated for the first time into English -- depicts a poet divided between despair and elation, thoughts of suicide and intimations of immortality; a man who could write to his mother, "We're obviously...