The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France - Softcover

Samuels, Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801489652 ISBN 13: 9780801489655

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Maurice Samuels is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania.

Review:

"Maurice Samuels's inquiry into nineteenth-century French culture leads him to examine what appears as the 'commodification' and 'fetishization' of history turned into an enticing spectacle and a set of illusory perspectives. In Samuels's well-crafted and carefully documented analysis, this dual process encompasses the passive reception of, and alienation from, visual as well as theatrical illusions."

(Catherine Nesci, University of California at Santa Barbara)

"Maurice Samuels opens up new perspectives on the invention of the modern society of the spectacle in post-Revolutionary France. Ranging across the spectrum of high and low literary and visual practices during the post-Revolutionary moment, Samuels details the formation of a distinctively realist way of representing historical and social processes. The book will interest readers concerned with nineteenth-century French literary and visual culture and the history of realist modes of representation, as well as all those seeking to understand the historical genesis of our cultural modernity."

(Margaret Cohen, author of The Sentimental Education of the Novel)

"This is an interesting, lively, and intelligent book. Maurice Samuels's literary historical readings are really excellent. In fact, they made me want to go back to the texts and reread them in terms of Samuels's interpretation. There can be no better evidence of an author's success than that."

(Vanessa Schwartz, author of Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801489652
• ISBN 13: 9780801489655
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296