Download or read book Paris Capital of Modernity written by David Harvey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting David Harvey's finest work on Paris during the second empire, Paris, Capital of Modernity offers brilliant insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Couer. The book is heavily illustrated and includes a number drawings, portraits and cartoons by Daumier, one of the greatest political caricaturists of the nineteenth century.

Download or read book Paris Capital of the Black Atlantic written by Jeremy Braddock and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2013-09-20 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How African-American artists and intellectuals sought greater liberty in Paris while also questioning the extent of the freedoms they so publicly praised.” —American Literary History Paris has always fascinated and welcomed writers. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, writers of American, Caribbean, and African descent were no exception. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic considers the travels made to Paris—whether literally or imaginatively—by black writers. These collected essays explore the transatlantic circulation of ideas, texts, and objects to which such travels to Paris contributed. Editors Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne expand upon an acclaimed special issue of the journal Modern Fiction Studies with four new essays and a revised introduction. Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois’s trip to Paris in 1900and ending with the contemporary state of diasporic letters in the French capital, this collection embraces theoretical close readings, materialist intellectual studies of networks, comparative essays, and writings at the intersection of literary and visual studies. Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic is unique both in its focus on literary fiction as a formal and sociological category and in the range of examples it brings to bear on the question of Paris as an imaginary capital of diasporic consciousness. “Demonstrate[s] how Black writers shaped history and contributed to conflicting notions of modernity hosted in Paris . . . The wide range of writers and scholars from American and Francophone studies makes this collection very original and an exciting adventure in concepts, movements, and ideologies that could be acceptable to non-specialists as well.” —American Studies

Download or read book Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century written by Hollis Clayson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

Download or read book How Paris Became Paris written by Joan DeJean and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Paris became the ultimate destination city.

Download or read book Paris written by Patrice L. R HIGONNET and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original and evocative journey through modern Paris from the mid-eighteenth century to World War II, Patrice Higonnet offers a delightful cultural portrait of a multifaceted, continually changing city. In examining the myths and countermyths of Paris that have been created and re-created over time, Higonnet reveals a magical urban alchemy in which each era absorbs the myths and perceptions of Paris past, adapts them to the cultural imperatives of its own time, and feeds them back into the city, creating a new environment. Paris was central to the modern world in ways internal and external, genuine and imagined, progressive and decadent. Higonnet explores Paris as the capital of revolution, science, empire, literature, and art, describing such incarnations as Belle Epoque Paris, the Commune, the surrealists' city, and Paris as viewed through American eyes. He also evokes the more visceral Paris of alienation, crime, material excess, and sensual pleasure. Insightful, informative, and gracefully written, "Paris" illuminates the intersection of collective and individual imaginations in a perpetually shifting urban dynamic. In describing his Paris of the real and of the imagination, Higonnet sheds brilliant new light on this endlessly intriguing city.

Download or read book Designs on Modernity written by Tag Gronberg and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tag Gronberg here presents the 1925 Paris Exhibition as a key moment in updating the image of Paris as 'capital of the 19th century'. He focuses on the Exhibition as a set of contesting representations of the modern city, stressing the importance of consumption and display for concepts of urban modernity.

Download or read book Tales of Two Cities written by Jonathan Conlin and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paris and London have long held a mutual fascination, and never more so than in the period 1750–1914, when they vied to be the world's greatest city. Each city has been the focus of many books, yet Jonathan Conlin here explores the complex relationship between them for the first time. The reach and influence of both cities was such that the story of their rivalry has global implications. By borrowing, imitating and learning from each other Paris and London invented the true metropolis. Tales of Two Cities examines and compares five urban spaces—the pleasure garden, the cemetery, the apartment, the restaurant and the music hall—that defined urban modernity in the nineteenth century. The citizens of Paris and London first created these essential features of the modern cityscape and so defined urban living for all of us.

Download or read book Paris in Modern Times written by Casey Harison and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon a vast body of historical scholarship, Casey Harison's Paris in Modern Times provides the first detailed academic history of Paris in the modern age. Chronologically surveying Paris's history from the Old Regime of the late-18th century through to the present day, this book explores the social, economic, political and cultural developments that come together to tell the story of this iconic city. Each chapter has an introduction and illuminating 'sidebars' that touch upon the ways in which Parisian history has intersected with wider changes in France and beyond. The text, which also includes a wealth of images, maps, and a further reading section, takes the opportunity to place Paris and its history in a broader French, Atlantic and global historical context in order to cover an essential aspect of what has been such an important city the world over. Paris in Modern Times is vital reading for anyone seeking to know more about the history of Paris or the history of France since the French Revolution.

Download or read book Apartment Stories written by Sharon Marcus and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In urban studies, the nineteenth century is the "age of great cities." In feminist studies, it is the era of the separate domestic sphere. But what of the city's homes? In the course of answering this question, Apartment Stories provides a singular and radically new framework for understanding the urban and the domestic. Turning to an element of the cityscape that is thoroughly familiar yet frequently overlooked, Sharon Marcus argues that the apartment house embodied the intersections of city and home, public and private, and masculine and feminine spheres. Moving deftly from novels to architectural treatises, legal debates, and popular urban observation, Marcus compares the representation of the apartment house in Paris and London. Along the way, she excavates the urban ghost tales that encoded Londoners' ambivalence about city dwellings; contends that Haussmannization enclosed Paris in a new regime of privacy; and locates a female counterpart to the flâneur and the omniscient realist narrator—the portière who supervised the apartment building.

Download or read book Dividing Paris written by Esther da Costa Meyer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dividing Paris: Urban Renewal and Social Inequality, 1852-1870 offers a new look at the ambitious urban changes that transformed the city of Paris during the Second Empire, when Paris became a template for urban renewal in many large cities in Europe, North, and South America. Esther da Costa Meyer looks at the social and historical of context of these urban changes--what Napoleon III, his prefect Georges-Eugene Haussman, and their team of engineers planned, as well as how the diverse and deeply stratified public responded to them. Along with broad streets and boulevards intended to enable crowds and merchandise to circulate and, also, impede the chances of popular insurgency, Haussman's project of urban renewal called for ample water supply, sewerage, and public parks and gardens. These changes radically altered the old, tightly-knit weave of the medieval city, serving the needs of the industrial bourgeoisie while forcing the urban poor to the outskirts. Dividing Paris is the first architectural history of the city that takes into account the larger part of the urban territory annexed in 1860, a ring of settlements and villages which became increasingly class-specific. Instead of relating the story of Haussmanization as a top-down administrative effort, as Haussman's critics and admirers have both tended to do, it draws on primary sources, especially newspapers and memoirs, to investigate the degree to which Parisians' experiences of modernity were class and gender-specific and to ask what strategies working class men and women in particular used to cope with and in some cases resist the changing world around them. At the same time, da Costa Meyer resists the familiar narrative of Paris as "capital of the 19th century" that has endured, at least since Walter Benjamin's famous essay, as euro-centric and misleading insofar as it fails to situate Paris's urban developments in a broader global context or to acknowledge the extent to which Haussmanization was itself implicated in the broader imperial project on which France was embarked at the time"--

Download or read book The Painting of Modern Life written by T.J. Clark and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From T.J. Clark comes this provocative study of the origins of modern art in the painting of Parisian life by Edouard Manet and his followers. The Paris of the 1860s and 1870s was a brand-new city, recently adorned with boulevards, cafés, parks, Great Exhibitions, and suburban pleasure grounds—the birthplace of the habits of commerce and leisure that we ourselves know as "modern life." A new kind of culture quickly developed in this remade metropolis, sights and spectacles avidly appropriated by a new kind of "consumer": clerks and shopgirls, neither working class nor bourgeois, inventing their own social position in a system profoundly altered by their very existence. Emancipated and rootless, these men and women flocked to the bars and nightclubs of Paris, went boating on the Seine at Argenteuil, strolled the island of La Grande-Jatte—enacting a charade of community that was to be captured and scrutinized by Manet, Degas, and Seurat. It is Clark's cogently argued (and profusely illustrated) thesis that modern art emerged from these painters' attempts to represent this new city and its inhabitants. Concentrating on three of Manet's greatest works and Seurat's masterpiece, Clark traces the appearance and development of the artists' favorite themes and subjects, and the technical innovations that they employed to depict a way of life which, under its liberated, pleasure-seeking surface, was often awkward and anxious. Through their paintings, Manet and the Impressionists ask us, and force us to ask ourselves: Is the freedom offered by modernity a myth? Is modern life heroic or monotonous, glittering or tawdry, spectacular or dull? The Painting of Modern Life illuminates for us the ways, both forceful and subtle, in which Manet and his followers raised these questions and doubts, which are as valid for our time as for the age they portrayed.

Download or read book Transforming Paris written by David P. Jordan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Paris we know today, with its grand boulevards, its bridges and parks, its monumental beauty, was essentially built in only seventeen years, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this brief period, whole neighborhoods of medieval and revolutionary Paris -- over-crowded, dangerous, and filthy -- were razed, and from the rubble a modern city of light and air emerged. This triumphant rebuilding was chiefly the work of one man, Baron Georges Haussmann, Napoleon III's Prefect of the Seine. It was Haussmann's task to assert, in stone, the power and permanence of Paris, to show the world that it was the seat of an empire of mythic proportions. To this end, he imposed grand visual perspectives, as when he transformed Napoleon I's Arc de Triomphe into a magnificent twelve-armed star from which radiated the broadest boulevards of Europe. Below ground, his modern sewer system became one of the wonders of the civilized world, eagerly toured by royalty and commoners alike. Haussmann's mandate was not only to create an impression of grandeur but to secure the city for better control by government. By creating formal spaces where there had previously been a maze of chaotic streets, Haussmann opened Paris to effective police control and thwarted the recurrent demonstration of its well-known revolutionary fervor. The determined and autocratic Haussmann imprinted rational order and bourgeois civility on the unruly city which had for so long simmered with riot and insurrection. Though he planted chestnut trees, installed gas lights, rebuilt the water supply, and improved transportation and housing, Haussmann's labors were (and remain) controversial. He forced tens of thousands of the poor from the center of the city, and destroyed significant parts of old Paris. But in this important new biography David Jordan reminds us that Haussmann was not immune to the charms of the old city. By leaving some areas intact, the Baron achieved the grand effect of implanting a modern city boldly within an ancient one. Here, at last, Haussmann's labors are given the aesthetic as well as the historical appreciation they deserve.

Download or read book Scenes of Parisian Modernity written by H. Hahn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Making Modern Paris written by Christopher Curtis Mead and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates how architecture, technology, politics, and urban planning came together in French architect Victor Baltard's creation of the Central Markets of Paris. Presents a case study of the historical process that produced modern Paris between 1840 and 1870.

Download or read book Rebel Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution written by David Harvey and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.

Download or read book The Gargoyles of Notre Dame written by Michael Camille and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 459 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the seven million people who visit the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris each year probably do not realize that the legendary gargoyles adorning this medieval masterpiece were not constructed until the nineteenth century. The first comprehensive history of these world-famous monsters, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame argues that they transformed the iconic thirteenth-century cathedral into a modern monument. Michael Camille begins his long-awaited study by recounting architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s ambitious restoration of the structure from 1843 to 1864, when the gargoyles were designed, sculpted by the little-known Victor Pyanet, and installed. These gargoyles, Camille contends, were not mere avatars of the Middle Ages, but rather fresh creations—symbolizing an imagined past—whose modernity lay precisely in their nostalgia. He goes on to map the critical reception and many-layered afterlives of these chimeras, notably in the works of such artists and writers as Charles Méryon, Victor Hugo, and photographer Henri Le Secq. Tracing their eventual evolution into icons of high kitsch, Camille ultimately locates the gargoyles’ place in the twentieth-century imagination, exploring interpretations by everyone from Winslow Homer to the Walt Disney Company. Lavishly illustrated with more than three hundred images of its monumental yet whimsical subjects, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is a must-read for historians of art and architecture and anyone whose imagination has been sparked by the lovable monsters gazing out over Paris from one of the world’s most renowned vantage points.

Download or read book Ideals of the Body written by Sun-Young Park and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the city—in the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational. Sun-Young Park reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.