The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France

Maurice Samuels

Published by Cornell University Press 2004

The Spectacular Past

Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France

Maurice Samuels

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501729836

Overview
Contents

About this book

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced...

Author / Editor information

Maurice Samuels is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

We are now all prisoners of the media sphere, and the global reign of the spectacle makes it tempting to romanticize the good old days before digital film, before television, before photography even. Maurice Samuels's fascinating new book on the culture of the historical spectacle in early nineteenth-century France will quickly cool any such impulse.... Samuels's book is a masterfully written, impeccably researched, and invaluable study that no one interested in Romanticism, modern French cultural history, or the critique of the spectacle can afford to miss.

Vanessa Schwartz, author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris:

This is an interesting, lively, and intelligent book. Maurice Samuels's literary historical readings are really excellent. In fact, they made me want to go back to the texts and reread them in terms of Samuels's interpretation. There can be no better evidence of an author's success than that.

Setting this compelling study of nineteenth-century French novels on a solid theoretical framework, Samuels considers the period around 1830, when new ways of looking at history inspired writers to turn France's past into spectacle.... In doing so, Samuels offers new ways of looking at Balzac and Stendahl and their past. Ultimately he gives readers cause to consider contemporary media representations of the recent past. Highly recommended.

Catherine Nesci, University of California at Santa Barbara:

Maurice Samuels's inquiry into nineteenth-century French culture leads him to examine what appears as the 'commodification' and 'fetishization' of history turned into an enticing spectacle and a set of illusory perspectives. In Samuels's well-crafted and carefully documented analysis, this dual process encompasses the passive reception of, and alienation from, visual as well as theatrical illusions.

Margaret Cohen, author of The Sentimental Education of the Novel:

Maurice Samuels opens up new perspectives on the invention of the modern society of the spectacle in post-Revolutionary France. Ranging across the spectrum of high and low literary and visual practices during the post-Revolutionary moment, Samuels details the formation of a distinctively realist way of representing historical and social processes. The book will interest readers concerned with nineteenth-century French literary and visual culture and the history of realist modes of representation, as well as all those seeking to understand the historical genesis of our cultural modernity.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
One. Showing the Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
Two. Spectacular Histories Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Three. Napoleon Takes the Stage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
Four. Scott Comes to France Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	151
Five. Balzac's Spectacular Revolution Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Six. Stendhal's Historical Role Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	266
Appendix Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 296
Illustrations
- Other: 14 halftones
Keywords: West European History; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: August 6, 2018
ISBN: 9781501729836