Elizabeth Emery - Böcker

Legends, tales, and mysteries featuring saints captivated the French at the end of the nineteenth century. As Jean Lorrain pointed out in an 1891 article for the popular weekly Le Courrier Francais, the seemingly simple language of the saints' lives, their noble battles between good and evil and the atmosphere of religious mysticism appealed to many, especially those involved in the visual and performing arts. Ironically The Third Republic (1870-1940), a regime that claimed to reinforce and institute the secular ideas of the French Revolution, was witness to this great popular interest in the saints and religious imagery.The eight essays in this work explore the popularity of the saints from the 1850s to the 1920s. The essays evaluate the role they played in literature, art, music, science, history and politics, examine portrayals of the saints' lives in both low and high culture (from children's literature, shadow plays and the popular press to literature, opera and theological studies), and reveal the prevalence of the saints in fin-de-siecle France.

Through an analysis of political, art historical, and literary discourse, this book considers French fascination with the Gothic cathedral.Romancing the Cathedral explores the late-nineteenth-century French passion for Gothic architecture, particularly the cathedral. Though maligned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and vandalized during the French Revolution, by World War I the cathedral was considered "the genius of the French nation," a privileged and patriotic work of art that surpassed such other national artworks as Wagner's operas and the Parthenon. However, the moment at which the Gothic style finally reached near-universal acclaim in France also coincided with one of the most anti-clerical periods of French history, the years surrounding the separation of church and state.Taking this contradiction as a starting point, Elizabeth Emery explores how the cathedral's popularity stemmed from its semantic richness as well as its glorification in the works of such writers and artists as Emile Zola, J.-K. Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, and others. Using their works as a springboard, Emery examines the ways in which they responded and contributed to prevailing discourses about the cathedral. Interdisciplinary in nature, Romancing the Cathedral will appeal to those interested in Gothic art and architecture, European cultural studies, medievalism, and French literature.

Through an analysis of political, art historical, and literary discourse, this book considers French fascination with the Gothic cathedral.Romancing the Cathedral explores the late-nineteenth-century French passion for Gothic architecture, particularly the cathedral. Though maligned in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and vandalized during the French Revolution, by World War I the cathedral was considered "the genius of the French nation," a privileged and patriotic work of art that surpassed such other national artworks as Wagner's operas and the Parthenon. However, the moment at which the Gothic style finally reached near-universal acclaim in France also coincided with one of the most anti-clerical periods of French history, the years surrounding the separation of church and state.Taking this contradiction as a starting point, Elizabeth Emery explores how the cathedral's popularity stemmed from its semantic richness as well as its glorification in the works of such writers and artists as Emile Zola, J.-K. Huysmans, Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, and others. Using their works as a springboard, Emery examines the ways in which they responded and contributed to prevailing discourses about the cathedral. Interdisciplinary in nature, Romancing the Cathedral will appeal to those interested in Gothic art and architecture, European cultural studies, medievalism, and French literature.

Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarmé, and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-siècle France - and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of 'at home' photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual, literary, and material cultures.

First published in 2003 Consuming the Past covers pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola, and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siècle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialisation.

First published in 2003 Consuming the Past covers pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola, and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siècle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialisation.

Japonisme, the 19th-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the 21st-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement.This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clémence d’Ennery (1823–98), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the “Musée d’Ennery” to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a 50-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d’Ennery’s struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day.Travelers to Japan such as the Duchesse de Persigny, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Laure Durand-Fardel returned with souvenirs that they shared with friends and family. Salon hostesses including Juliette Adam, Louise Cahen d’Anvers, Princesse Mathilde, and Marguerite Charpentier provided venues for the discussion and examination of Japanese art objects, as did well-known art dealers Madame Desoye, Madame Malinet, Madame Hatty, and Madame Langweil. Writers, actresses, and artists—Judith Gautier, Thérèse Bentzon, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few— took inspiration from the Japanese material in circulation to create their own unique works of art.Largely absent from the history of Japonisme, these women—and many others—actively collected Japanese art, interacted with auction houses and art dealers, and formed collections now at the heart of museums such as the Louvre, the Musée Guimet, the Musée Cernuschi, the Musée Unterlinden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the forefront of the French imagination at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. This study analyzes representations of the apartments and houses of Corneille, Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Sand, Zola, Loti, Montesquiou, Mallarmé, and Proust, among others, arguing that the writer's home became a contested space and an important part of the French patrimony at this time. This is the first book to emphasize the house museum as an essentially modern construct, and to trace the history of ideas leading to its institutionalization in twentieth-century France. The interdisciplinary study also brings new attention to the importance of photojournalism for fin-de-siècle France - and brings to light fascinating and forgotten examples of 'at home' photography by Dornac and Henri Mairet. Elizabeth Emery provides a fresh and compelling perspective on conjunctions between visual, literary, and material cultures.

A unique experiment at the frontlines of the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic collapsed more than thirty years ago. But it did not simply vanish. Far from being a footnote in history, the state and its legacies continue to inform identities, politics, and culture today. Studies of surveillance and government control, individual agency and equal opportunity, informal networks, strategic alliances, and strategies subverting limitations on freedom of expression prompt us to rethink our conceptualizations of the GDR.Introducing the work of a new generation of researchers, this collection applies such approaches to a wide range of examples from film, theatre, music, literature, radio, and law. The chapters explore and transgress temporal, national, and disciplinary boundaries. From these investigations emerges a pervasive pattern of informal, border-transcending spheres, subversive identity discourses, and effective agency. Drawing variously on concepts such as Eigen-Sinn, informal society, and alternative public spheres, the papers presented here highlight the relevance of GDR Studies looking forwards. More than a volume about just the past, The GDR Tomorrow holds implications for the future.

New examinations of the role storytelling played in medieval life.The storyteller stands at the crossroads of orality and performance, surrounded by a circle of rapt listeners. Evelyn Birge Vitz has challenged a generation of scholars to join the circle, listen as they read, and exchange pen forperformance. A tribute to her work, the fifteen essays in this volume attend to the qualities of voice, their registers and dynamics, whether practiced or impromptu, falsified, overlapping, interrupted or whispered. They examinehow the book became a performance venue and reshaped the storyteller's image and authority, and they investigate the mutability of stories that move from book to book, place to place and among competing cultures to stimulate cultural and political change. They show storytelling as far more than entertainment, but central to law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. Themes that crisscross the volume include tensionsamong amateurs and professionals, dominant and minority languages and cultures, women and children's engagement with storytelling, animality, religion, translation, travel, didacticism and entertainment.Kathryn A. Duys is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University; Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer in French at Barnard College of Columbia University.Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Maureen Boulton, Cristian Bratu, Simonetta Cochis, Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, Kathryn A.Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Marilyn Lawrence, Kathleen Loysen, Laurie Postlewate, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Samuel N. Rosenberg, E. Gordon Whatley, Linda Marie Zaerr.