The Spectacular Past
Title | The Spectacular Past PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Samuels |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 297 |
Release | 2018-08-06 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1501729837 |
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.
The Spectacular Past
Title | The Spectacular Past PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Samuels |
Publisher | Cornell University Press |
Pages | 300 |
Release | 2004 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780801489655 |
Introduction -- Showing the past -- Spectacular histories -- Napoleon takes the stage -- Scott comes to France -- Balzac's spectacular revolution -- Stendhal's historical role -- Conclusion.
The Spectacular Now
Title | The Spectacular Now PDF eBook |
Author | Tim Tharp |
Publisher | Scholastic UK |
Pages | 232 |
Release | 2014-02-06 |
Genre | Juvenile Fiction |
ISBN | 1407146467 |
Sutter's the guy you want at your party. Aimee's not. She needs help and it's up to Sutter to show Aimee a splendiferous time and then let her go forth and prosper. But Aimee's not like other girls and before long he's over his head. For the first time in his life he has the power to make a difference in someone else's life - or ruin it forever.
Spectacular Realities
Title | Spectacular Realities PDF eBook |
Author | Vanessa R. Schwartz |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 244 |
Release | 1998 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0520221680 |
"An exciting, innovative, and significant work. The author points to how the crowd experience transcended class and gender divisions and was transformed from acts of collective violence into acts of collective consumption."—Michael B. Miller, author of Shanghai on the Métro
The Spectacular
Title | The Spectacular PDF eBook |
Author | Zoe Whittall |
Publisher | Ballantine Books |
Pages | 323 |
Release | 2021-09-14 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1524799424 |
Three generations of women strive for real freedom in this startling, provocative novel exploring sexuality, gender, and maternal ambivalence, from the acclaimed author of The Best Kind of People. “In the best books, characters feel like my friends, but with the mothers of The Spectacular, they came to feel like my family.”—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby It’s 1997 and Missy is a cellist in an indie rock band on tour across America. At twenty-two years old, she gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. As the only girl in the band, she’s determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving a guy in every town. But then she meets a tomboy drummer who is hard to forget, and a forgotten flap of cocaine strands her at the border. Fortysomething Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga center where she has been living when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter, Missy, winds up crashing at her house, she decides it’s time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand one another again. In this sharply observed novel, Zoe Whittall captures three very different women who each struggle to build an authentic life. Definitions of family, romance, gender, and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular.
Radio City Spectacular
Title | Radio City Spectacular PDF eBook |
Author | Radio City Entertainment |
Publisher | It Books |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2007-11-27 |
Genre | Performing Arts |
ISBN | 9780061565380 |
A Photographic History of the Rockettes and Christmas Spectacular
Inventing the Israelite
Title | Inventing the Israelite PDF eBook |
Author | Maurice Samuels |
Publisher | Stanford University Press |
Pages | 336 |
Release | 2009-12-07 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0804773424 |
In this book, Maurice Samuels brings to light little known works of literature produced from 1830 to 1870 by the first generation of Jews born as French citizens. These writers, Samuels asserts, used fiction as a laboratory to experiment with new forms of Jewish identity relevant to the modern world. In their stories and novels, they responded to the stereotypical depictions of Jews in French culture while creatively adapting the forms and genres of the French literary tradition. They also offered innovative solutions to the central dilemmas of Jewish modernity in the French context—including how to reconcile their identities as Jews with the universalizing demands of the French revolutionary tradition. While their solutions ranged from complete assimilation to a modern brand of orthodoxy, these writers collectively illustrate the creativity of a community in the face of unprecedented upheaval.