"Essor"

This short story reimagines Leuven/ Louvain in the late nineteenth century through the surrealist perspective of a ghostly Baudelaire. Drawing on Baudelaire's works and biography, it biofictionally creates an imaginative collage of scenes and metaphors to provide a different angle, critical, decolonial, and nonconformist, on the atmosphere of the university town. The story is inspired by an archival quest for early editions of Baudelaire in the Special Collections of the University Library.