Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Mary Gluck

Published by Harvard University Press 2005

Popular Bohemia

Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Mary Gluck

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674037670

Overview
Contents

About this book

This revisionist examination of the period between 1830 and 1914 reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.

Reviews

Gluck is a fine intellectual historian whose first book on Lukács was in every way a triumph of scholarship. Her new book, Popular Bohemia, is at the same level and may even exceed her earlier work in terms of originality.
-- Walter Adamson, author of Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism

Gluck's book is a wonderfully conceived contribution to the overhaul of our understanding of modernism that has been in full swing in many fields for some time now. Our view of literary modernism, she argues, has been distorted by taking the aloof figure of the aesthete, and self-referential art, at the turn of the twentieth century as the ostensible end-points in the emergence of modernism, and then by looking back to romanticism to trace their genealogy. She challenges this view on a number of counts: it misinterprets the figure of the modernist artist as someone estranged from commercial society and public culture; it obscures our appreciation of "the transient, the commercial and popular forms of modernism"; and it ignores the lineage of realism in the making of modernism. It is not only that there is a lot of non-canonical modernist popular culture out there; others have said that, and she draws on their work judiciously. More interestingly, she is claiming that we misunderstand canonical figures such as Gautier, Baudelaire, and Huysmans unless we take their relationship to the "mass cultural public sphere" into account. Modernism is rooted in a "theatrical and public vision," not a withdrawal into interiority. The avant-garde project is the legitimate heir of an earlier, publicly oriented culture, not a retreat from it.
-- John McCole, author of Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition

This is a book worth grappling with. The larger argument will set historians of modern art and literature to pondering, and readers will find here a trove of insightful readings and interesting details in the byways of nineteenth-century Parisian culture.
-- Gregory Shaya Journal of Modern History

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
1. The Historical Bohemian and the Discourse of Modernism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. The Romantic Bohemian and the Performance of Melodrama Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
3. The Flâneur and the Phantasmagoria of the Modern City Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
4. The Decadent and the Culture of Hysteria Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	108
5. The Primitivist Artist and the Discourse of Exoticism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	189
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 238

eBook

Published: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 9780674037670