The ideal city : the city as an ideal

Strona wydawcy: https://www.wuj.pl

The concept of an ideal city which is closely linked with utopian ideas and totalitarian trends and occurs in various cultures, including Christianity (as an image of Heavenly Jerusalem that diff ers from primary Eden as it experienced history and civilization) is a very broad concept serving various and often contradictory outlooks. My presentation is a comparative analysis of two poems which border on modern thinking: Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Baudelaire’s Parisian Dream. Both poems, which use the oneiric poetics and urban topic to reveal a specific concept of aesthetic and axiological perfection, shall be presented in the context of the changes in the way the city was perceived in the 19th century resulting in the acceptance of the ideal of the city as a symbol of modern identity and, particularly in the avant-garde thinking, as a matrix of a new ideal of human sensitivity development.