This dissertation examines the post-Romantic persistence of artistic genius in French literary modernism. Through analyses of literary, aesthetic, theoretical, and philosophical texts by Charles Baudelaire, Isidore Ducasse (the Comte de Lautréamont), and Maurice Blanchot, I examine how post-Romantic writers recuperate a notion of genius grounded in divine inspiration, nature, or the absolute. This idea of genius becomes philosophically untenable against the backdrop of Friedrich Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the Death of God: insofar as God functions as a heteronomous term with which conceptions of subjectivity have been invariably entangled since the inauguration of modern philosophy by the Cartesian cogito—thereby grounding all metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic claims—Nietzsche’s remarks have explicit consequences for this view of genius. My readings depict the preservation of a constellation of Romantic tropes, such as the artist’s halo, that live on in post-Romantic texts. Rather than positing new expositions of genius that bear no relation to Romanticism, my dissertation, building on theoretical developments in Nietzsche’s writings, considers how these tropes are freed from the strictures of philosophical or theoretical discourse in order to foreground a process of poiesis. Emphasizing the specificities of texts through a practice of close reading, I show that rather than serving merely as the condition of possibility of artistic production, genius becomes something that is itself written or produced by texts. Tropes of Romantic genius undergo a “re-fabulization” which restores and preserves the genius as a subject for art despite growing skepticism brought on by the philosophical, economic, and social forces of modernity.