Although obscure at the time of its initial publication, Maldoror was rediscovered and championed by the Surrealist artists during the early twentieth century.

[a] Maldoror was itself influenced by earlier gothic literature of the period, including Lord Byron's Manfred, and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer.

[c] The text often employs very long, unconventional and confusing sentences which, together with the dearth of paragraph breaks, may suggest a stream of consciousness, or automatic writing.

The book's central character is Maldoror, a figure of evil who is sometimes directly involved in a chapter's events, or else revealed to be watching at a distance.

"Apart from these opening segments, each chapter is typically an isolated, often surreal episode, which does not seem at first to be directly related to the surrounding material.

Another strange episode occurs in an early chapter: the narrator encounters a giant glow-worm which commands him to kill a woman, who symbolizes prostitution.

I climbed the mountain until I reached the top: from there, I hurled the stone on to the shining worm, crushing it.As the work progresses, certain common themes emerge among the episodes.

These animals are praised precisely for their inhumanity, which fits the work's misanthropic tone: The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved.

Then by common accord they glide towards one another underwater, the female shark using its fins, Maldoror cleaving the waves with his arms; and they hold their breath in deep veneration, each one wishing to gaze for the first time upon the other, his living portrait.

When they are three yards apart they suddenly and spontaneously fall upon one another like two lovers and embrace with dignity and gratitude, clasping each other as tenderly as brother and sister.

The final part (specifically its last eight chapters), intended as a "little novel" which parodies the forms of the nineteenth-century novel,[12] presents a linear story using simpler language.

Some of the material was copied from encyclopedias by Buffon, and from his collaborator Guéneau de Monbeillard, through Encyclopédie d'histoire naturelle, reprints made by a nineteenth-century compiler, Jean-Charles Chenu,[14] such as the following section in Canto 5, Strophe 2:[15]I knew that the family of the pelicanides consists of four distinct genera: the gannet, the pelican, the cormorant, and the frigate-bird.

The first canto subsequently featured in a collection of poetry by Évariste Carrance called Les Parfums de l'âme in Bourdeaux in 1869.

The complete work, which consists of six cantos and is written under the pseudonym "Comte de Lautréamont", was printed in Belgium August 1869.

The editor of the latter, Albert Lacroix, denied any association with the work and refused to put it on sale for fear of the legal proceedings (this was in part because the author had not paid the 12,000 francs required for the full print run).

[16] Les Chants de Maldoror is considered to have been a major influence upon French Symbolism, Dada, and Surrealism; editions of the book have been illustrated by Odilon Redon,[17] Salvador Dalí,[18] and René Magritte.

Ducasse admitted to being inspired by Adam Mickiewicz and the form of "The Great Improvisation" from the third part of the Polish bard's Forefathers' Eve.