History : France

Ivan Strenski debunks the common notion that there is anything "essentially" Jewish in Durkheim's work. Seeking the Durkheim inside the real world of Jews in France rather than the imagined Jewishness inside Durkheim himself, Strenski adopts a Durkheimian approach to understanding Durkheim's thought. In so doing he shows for the first time that Durkheim's sociology (especially his sociology of religion) took form in relation to the Jewish intellectual life of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France. Strenski begins each chapter by weighing particular claims (some anti-Semitic, some not) for the Jewishness of Durkheim's work. In each case Strenski overturns the claim while showing that it can nonetheless open up a fruitful inquiry into the relation of Durkheim to French Jewry. For example, Strenski shows that Durkheim's celebration of ritual had no innately Jewish source but derived crucially from work on Hinduism by the Jewish Indologist Sylvain Lévi, whose influence on Durkheim and his followers has never before been acknowledged. more...

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What did it mean to call someone 'eccentric' in 19th-century Paris? Drawing on etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, and psychiatric treatises, this interdisciplinary study illuminates figures of Parisian modernity, from the courtesan and Bohemian to the female dandy and circus freak. - ;What did it mean to call someone 'eccentric' in nineteenth-century Paris? And why did breaking with convention arouse such ambivalent responses in middle-class readers, writers, and spectators? From high society to Bohemia and the demi-monde to the madhouse, the scandal of nonconformism provoked anxiety, disgust, and often secret yearning. In a culture preoccupied by the need for order yet simultaneously drawn to the values of freedom and innovation, eccentricity. continually tested the boundaries of bourgeois identity, ultimately becoming inseparable from it. This interdisciplinary study charts shifting French perceptions of the anomalous and bizarre from the 1830s to the fin de si--egrave--;cle, focusing on three key issues. First, during the July Monarchy eccentricity was linked to. fashion, dandyism, and commodity culture; to many Parisians it epitomized the dangerous seductions of modernity and the growing prestige of the courtesan. Second, in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution eccentricity was associated with the Bohemian artists and performers who inhabited 'the unknown Paris', a zone of social exclusion which middle-class spectators found both fascinating and repugnant. Finally, the popularization of medical theories of national decline in the latter part of the. century led to decreasing tolerance for individual difference, and eccentricity was interpreted as a symptom of hidden insanity and deformity. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, and psychiatric treatises, the study highlights the. central role of gender in shaping perceptions of eccentricity. It provide more...

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Rimbaud’s poems feature in this re-creation of the Communard experience. more...

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By 1931, the time of the huge Colonial Exhibition in Paris, France had the second largest empire in the world extending to the four corners of the globe. Yet, intriguingly the multi-various impact of the empire upon French culture and society has been largely ignored by historians. This volume aims to redress this balance and will explore how the idea of empire was expressed in film, photography, painting and monuments. It analyzes how the image of the universal, civilising mission saturated French society during the first half of the Twentieth century. In particular it examines how the subject peoples of the empire were represented in art and fiction. In this way the volume underlines that there was not just one single image of empire but many ranging from the extreme right to the extreme left. It contains an in-depth consideration not just of the triumphalist images of empire but the oppositional ones, most notably the surrealists, which directly challenged the emergent colonial consensus. more...

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Covered in this encyclopedia are the people, events, and ideas that shaped the transformative political ideologies arising from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. more...

Price: $247.50