Innumerable scholars have looked to Alison Fairlie for guidance in locating important areas for research and in choosing productive and provocative critical questions to ask about nineteenth-century French literature. These essays contain not simply practical guidance, but intellectual stimulus far richer than that provided by many of the full-length critical volumes that others have devoted to Constant, Baudelaire, Nerval and Flaubert. The essays in this volume, which was originally published in paperback in 1984, fall into four sharply characterised groups, one on each author. In each group, Alison Fairlie explores a recurrent set of critical problems and describes a series of exemplary encounters between language and the artistic imagination. Also containing a previously unpublished essay on Nerval and a bibliography of Professor Fairlie's critical writings, this is a volume readers of all kinds will find a work of exceptional depth and coherence.