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Maurice Samuels - Spectacular Past, Häftad

Häftad, Engelska, 2004

Spectacular Past

Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France

Av Maurice Samuels

575 kr

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Beskrivning
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.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2004-09-07
  • Mått: 152 x 229 x 21 mm
  • Vikt: 454 g
  • Format: Häftad
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 296
  • Förlag: Cornell University Press
  • ISBN: 9780801489655
  • Utmärkelser: Winner of the 2007 Gaddis Smith Book Prize (MacMil
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Maurice Samuels is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

Recensioner i media

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.(Choice) 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.(French Forum)

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