The Satiric Decade

The Satiric Decade
Author: Amy Wiese Forbes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780739129456

"Where do democratic political practices originate? This issue has long concerned republics, but few historians have studied the process by which people learn the skills of rights-based government. In this illuminating history, Amy Wiese Forbes addresses these origins by analyzing how republicanism took shape through the political satire that flooded French newspapers, theaters, courtrooms, and even academic life in 1830. Forbes shows that satire was the chief source of the critical spirit of republicanism that erupted in the 1840s and sustained the Republic in the 1870s and argues against the notion that satire had no lasting political impact. This book will speak to historians of French politics, republicanism, popular culture, the July Monarchy, satire and political humor, class and gender formation, and legal history." --Book Jacket.

Currencies

Currencies
Author: Society of Dix-Neuviémistes. Annual Conference
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2005
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783039105137

The thirteen essays in this volume, based on selected papers given at the Second Annual Conference of the Society of Dix-Neuviémistes (2003), explore the relationships between symbolic, monetary and literary currencies in nineteenth-century France. Essays focus on the sometimes surprising treatment of capitalism and commodity culture in the works of Mallarmé, Zola and Huysmans; the transfer and borrowing of economic and literary commodities, names, and concepts in nineteenth-century culture, from Flora Tristan's July Monarchy to Schwob's fin-de-siècle moment; and the interplay between wealth and identity, and commerce and globalisation, in the writings of Hugo, Janin, and Balzac. While it is widely acknowledged that the theme of money is central to nineteenth-century literature, this volume is innovative in tracing the variation, breadth and ubiquity of the idea of currencies in the cultural imaginary of the epoch.

Scenes of Parisian Modernity

Scenes of Parisian Modernity
Author: H. Hahn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2009-11-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230101933

Integrating the history of Paris with the history of consumption, the press, publicity, advertising and spectacle, this book traces the evolution of the urban core districts of consumption and explores elements of consumer culture such as the print media, publishing, retail techniques, tourism, city marketing, fashion, illustrated posters and Montmartre culture in the nineteenth century. Hahn emphasizes the tension between art and industry and between culture and commerce, a dynamic that significantly marked urban commercial modernity that spread new imaginary about consumption. She argues that Parisian consumer culture arose earlier than generally thought, and explores the intense commercialization Paris underwent.

The Subject of Murder

The Subject of Murder
Author: Lisa Downing
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-05-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 022600368X

The subject of murder has always held a particular fascination for us. But, since at least the nineteenth century, we have seen the murderer as different from the ordinary citizen—a special individual, like an artist or a genius, who exists apart from the moral majority, a sovereign self who obeys only the destructive urge, sometimes even commanding cult followings. In contemporary culture, we continue to believe that there is something different and exceptional about killers, but is the murderer such a distinctive type? Are they degenerate beasts or supermen as they have been depicted on the page and the screen? Or are murderers something else entirely? In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Upending the usual treatment of murderers as isolated figures or exceptional individuals, Downing argues that they are ordinary people, reflections of our society at the intersections of gender, agency, desire, and violence.

Art against censorship

Art against censorship
Author: Erin Duncan-O'Neill
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2024-07-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526168383

Honoré Daumier (1808–79), who was imprisoned early on for a politically offensive cartoon, painted scenes from seventeenth-century theatre and literature at moments of stifling censorship later in his career. He continued to find form for dangerous political dissent in the face of intense and shifting censorship laws by drawing on La Fontaine, Molière, and Cervantes, masters of dissimulation and critique in a newly glorified literary past. This book reveals new connections between legal repression and subversive fine-arts practice, showing the force of Daumier’s role in the broader stories of image-text relationships and political expression.