Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: M. Lyons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230287808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower-class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France. The author presents a series of case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: M. Lyons
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230287808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower-class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France. The author presents a series of case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.

Reading Culture & Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France

Reading Culture & Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: Martyn Lyons
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442692030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Between about 1830 and the outbreak of the First World War, print culture, reading, and writing transformed cultural life in Western Europe in many significant ways. Book production and consumption increased dramatically, and practices such as letter- and diary-writing were widespread. This study demonstrates the importance of the nineteenth century in French cultural change and illustrates the changing priorities and concerns of l'histoire du livre since the 1970s. From the 1830s on, book production experienced an industrial revolution which led to the emergence of a mass literary culture by the close of the century. At the same time, the western world acquired mass literacy. New categories of readers became part of the reading public while western society also learned to write. Reading Culture and Writing Practices in Nineteenth-Century France examines how the concerns of historians have shifted from a search for statistical sources to more qualitative assessments of readers' responses. Martyn Lyons argues that autobiographical sources are vitally important to this investigation and he considers examples of the intimate and everyday writings of ordinary people. Featuring original and intriguing insights as well as references to material hitherto inaccessible to English readers, this study presents a form of 'history from below' with emphasis on the individual reader and writer, and his or her experiences and perceptions.

The Spectacular Past

The Spectacular Past PDF Author: Maurice Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501729837
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
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 during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

A Social History of France in the 19th Century

A Social History of France in the 19th Century PDF Author: Christophe Charle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Intended for history students and general readers, this book introduces and analyzes the dynamics and relationships of the various social groups or classes of 19th-century France - the nobility, bourgeoisie, middle class and petty bourgeoisie.

Popular French Romanticism

Popular French Romanticism PDF Author: James Smith Allen
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815622321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Focusing on the Paris book world of this period, Allen reveals how the rise of a new popular literature—jolly chansonniers, the roman-feuilletons or serial novels, melodramas, gothic and sentimental novels, dramatic nationalistic histories—by such authors as Dumas, Sand, Lamennais, Ancelot, Desnoyer, and de Kock coincided with remarkable developments in the production, distribution, and consumption of books. Allen's research ranges from a survey of the then-popular romantic titles and authors and the trade catalogs of booksellers and lending libraries, to the police records of their activities, diaries and journals of working people, and military conscript records and ministerial literacy statistics. The result is a remarkable picture of the exchange between elite and popular culture, the interaction between ideas and their material reality, and the relationship between the literature and the history of France in the romantic period.

Changing France

Changing France PDF Author: Anne Green
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783080701
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The French Second Empire (1852-70) was a time of exceptionally rapid social, industrial and technological change. French literature also underwent fundamental changes during this period as writers embraced ‘modernity’ and incorporated new technologies, fashions and inventions into their work. Focusing on cultural areas such as exhibitions, transport, food, dress and photography, ‘Changing France’ shows how apparently trivial aspects of modern life provided Second Empire writers with a versatile means of thinking about deeper issues. This volume brings literature and material culture together to reveal how writing itself changed as writers recognised the extraordinarily rich possibilities of expression opened up to them by the changing material world.

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France

Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France PDF Author: M. Lyons
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780333921265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the nineteenth century, the reading public expanded to embrace new categories of consumers, especially of cheap fiction. These new lower-class and female readers frightened liberals, Catholics and republicans alike. The study focuses on workers, women and peasants, and the ways in which their reading was constructed as a social and political problem, to analyse the fear of reading in nineteenth century France. The author presents a series of case-studies of actual readers, to examine their choices and their practices, and to evaluate how far they responded to (or subverted) attempts at cultural domination.

Victims of the Book

Victims of the Book PDF Author: Francois Proulx
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487532180
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Victims of the Book uncovers a long-neglected but once widespread subgenre: the fin-de-siècle novel of formation in France. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, social commentators insistently characterized excessive reading as an emasculating illness that afflicted French youth. Novels about and geared toward adolescent male readers were imbued with a deep worry over young Frenchmen’s masculinity, as evidenced by titles like Crise de jeunesse (Youth in Crisis, 1897), La Crise virile (Crisis of Virility, 1898), La Vie stérile (A Sterile Life, 1892), and La Mortelle Impuissance (Deadly Impotence, 1903). In this book, François Proulx examines a wide panorama of these novels, as well as polemical essays, pedagogical articles, and medical treatises on the perceived threats posed by young Frenchmen’s reading habits. Fin-de-siècle writers responded to this pathologization of reading with a profusion of novels addressed to young male readers, paradoxically proposing their own novels as potential cures. In the early twentieth century, this corpus was critically revisited by a new generation of writers. Victims of the Book shows how André Gide and Marcel Proust in particular reworked the fin-de-siècle paradox to subvert cultural norms about literature and masculinity, proposing instead a queer pact between writer and reader.

The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader

The Nineteenth-century Visual Culture Reader PDF Author: Vanessa R. Schwartz
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415308663
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The nineteenth century is central to contemporary discussions of visual culture. This reader brings together key writings on the period, exploring such topics as photographs, exhibitions and advertising.

Coiffures

Coiffures PDF Author: Carol de Dobay Rifelj
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 0874130999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Examines nineteenth-century hairstyles and their cultural associations, and analyzes the social and symbolic roles that hair played in literary representations of the new body ideal of the era in fashion magazines, and as clues to social status, sexual availability and character in the fiction of major French authors including Baudelaire, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.