Taking as its point of departure the two poems, "Correspondances" by Baudelaire and "Les correspondances" by Alphonse-Louis Constant, The Dream of an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture traces the reception and popularization of several key Swedenborgian doctrines in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French literature and popular culture, notably the doctrine of correspondences. Contrary to what Michel Foucault argued in his early Les mots et les choses, in nineteenth-century France, the word "correspondences" does not denote a break with "representation," at least as it was used by nineteenth-century French writers: rather it is intimately bound up with the taxonomic structures of natural history—and also with the desire to understand the social world in terms of an ordered and controllable totality. Because it crops up in texts we now classify as canonical and also those outside the canon, and because it is so clearly related to notions of literary structure and effect, the word "correspondences" and its transformations in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France offers a vantage point for discerning how artists and writers defined their work both within and against a context of cultures defined as elite, "popular," and even ideological.

This is the first major study of Australian poet Christopher Brennan's 1914 work Poems, a very deliberate livre composé inspired by Western esoteric, Romantic, and Symbolist currents of thought. This book argues that Brennan's primary focus was the notion of a higher self.

Analyse la problématique du rêve au siècle des lumières : la première partie s'interroge sur les connaissances transmises par les encyclopédistes, les philosophes, les théologiens, les médecins et les anthropologues, et propose deux études consacrées à Swedenborg et Herder ; une seconde partie étudie le rêve dans les divers genres littéraires et s'attarde sur le rêve érotique de Goethe.