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A Crisis of Distinction: Reading Fin-de-Siècle Anxieties through Les Types de Paris
- Author(s):
- Nicky Agate (see profile)
- Date:
- 2014
- Group(s):
- History of Art, History of Illustration and Illustration Studies, LLC 19th-Century French, MS Visual Culture, Place Studies, TC History and Literature, Urban Studies
- Subject(s):
- Nineteenth century, Art, History, Culture--Study and teaching, French literature, France, Area studies, Literature and history, Travel writing
- Item Type:
- Dissertation
- Institution:
- New York University
- Tag(s):
- 19th Century, cultural studies, ethnicity, french studies, genre studies, history, illustrated books, law and literature, literary geography, mapping, microhistory, monuments, paris, picture books, print culture, urbanism, visual art, women, 19th century, Art history, Cultural studies, French studies, History and literature, Interdisciplinary studies, Travel narratives, Urban studies, Visual culture
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6PC7S
- Abstract:
- This dissertation combines micro-history, literary geography, urbanism, and the history of the French illustrated book. I work outwards from Les Types de Paris, a virtually ignored and chaotically hybrid collection of essays, short stories, physiologies and poetry that I position as a latter-day rewriting of the panoramic literature of the 1840s. This iteration, I argue, has to address a city that has become unheimlich for its inhabitants. Post-Haussmann, post-1870, in the throes of an Exposition universelle: this has become a city in constant flux. The volume’s contributors—from Edmond de Goncourt, Mallarmé, and Maupassant to Mirbeau, Richepin, and Zola—collaborate with its illustrator-curator, Jean-François Raffaëlli to try to make sense of a city whose social, gender, and geographical boundaries are no longer fixed. The resultant visual-verbal ensemble reveals a bourgeois urban class ridden with the anxieties of modernity—from the increasing visibility and mobility of the working class, to a crisis of masculinity in the face of defeat, to the shifting social and geographical borders of the city in which it lives. Here, the panoramic format reflects the authors' desire to frame the fluid, to stay the tide of change. Chapter Breakdown: 1. Beasts of Burden and All-Consuming Machines 2. The Spectacle of Science: The Foreigner in France 3. Taming the Peripheral: The Chiffonniers of Paris 4. Re-placing Paris: The New Topography
- Metadata:
- xml
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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