The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order and the entry into the industrial age was most dramatically played out in France, with the growth of a new urban middle class under the July monarchy and the rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann under the Second Empire. The personal, immediate, and radical effects of these changes produced an altered conception of the meaning of home and a homeland. Focusing primarily on mid-nineteenth-century France, these essays, by noted literary critics, offer fascinating new accounts of the relationship between the social history of home and homelessness and the imaginative expressions of the age. This probing interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical sophistication with historical detail, addresses the fundamental importance of class and gender to the modern history of homelessness. Its provocative readings of well-known texts provide a model of cultural studies at its best and most serious.

Combines social (Habermas) and cultural theory with history of major union in early twentieth-century France.

Relying on a range of visual and written sources, Gender, Space, and the Gaze offers fresh ways of considering how masculinity and femininity were lived in late nineteenth-century Paris. The book moves beyond shopworn dichotomies, rooted in Baudelaire’s "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863), that have shaped scholarship on this period.

This study of tangible and intangible cultural heritage explains the significance of nobles’ conservationist traditions for public engagement with the history of France. During the French Revolution nobles’ property was seized, destroyed, or sold off by the nation. State intervention during the nineteenth century meant historic monuments became protected under law in the public interest. The Journées du Patrimoine, created in 1984 by the French Ministry for Culture, became a Europe-wide calendar event in 1991. Each year millions of French and international visitors enter residences and museums to admire France’s aristocratic cultural heritage. Drawing on archival evidence from across the country, the book presents a compelling account of power, interest and emotion in family dynamics and nobles’ relations with rural and urban communities.

Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.

Making use of new research materials, Sick Heroes offers fresh insight into the romantic spirit. It sheds light on the particular creations of the romantic world, on the causes for Romanticism, on French Romanticism as an aesthetic and social reality, and on the period's collective mentality.

Nineteenth-century French Realism focuses on metropolitan France, with Paris as its undisputed heart. Through Jennifer Yee's close reading of the great novelists of the French realist and naturalist canon - Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant - The Colonial Comedy reveals that the colonies play a role at a distance even in the most apparently metropolitan texts. In what Edward Said called 'geographical notations' of race and imperialism the presence of the colonies off-stage is apparent as imported objects, colonial merchandise, and individuals whose colonial experience is transformative. Indeed, the realist novel registers the presence of the emerging global world-system through networks of importation, financial speculation, and immigration as well as direct colonial violence and power structures. The literature of the century responds to the last decades of French slavery, and direct colonialism (notably in Algeria), but also economic imperialism and the extension of French influence elsewhere. Far from imperialist triumphalism, in the realist novel exotic objects are portrayed as fake or mass-produced for the growing bourgeois market, while economic imperialism is associated with fraud and manipulation. The deliberate contrast of colonialism and exoticism within the metropolitan novel, and ironic distancing of colonial narratives, reveal the realist mode to be capable of questioning its own epistemological basis. The Colonial Comedy argues for the existence in the nineteenth century of a Critical Orientalism characterized by critique of its own discursive foundations. Using the tools of literary analysis within a materialist approach, The Colonial Comedy opens up the domestic Paris-Provinces axis to signifying chains pointing towards the colonial space.