As the twentieth century dawned and France entered an era of extraordinary labor activism and industrial competition, an insistently romantic vision of the Parisian garment worker was deployed by politicians, reformers, and artists to manage anxieties about economic and social change. Nostalgia about a certain kind of France was written onto the bodies of the capital's couture workers throughout French pop culture from the 1880s to the 1930s. And the midinettes-as these women were called- were written onto the geography of Paris itself, by way of festivals, monuments, historic preservation, and guide books. The idealized working Parisienne stood in for, at once, the superiority of French taste and craft, and the political (and sexual) subordination of French women and labour. But she was also the public face of more than 80,000 real working women whose demands for better labour conditions were inflected, distorted, and, in some cases, amplified by this ubiquitous Romantic type in the decades straddling World War I. Working Girls bridges cultural histories of the Parisian imaginary and histories of French labour, and puts them in raucous dialogue with one another: a letter by a nineteen-year-old seamstress, a speech by a government minister; a frothy Parisian guide by a bon vivant, the minutes of a union meeting; a bawdy café-concert song, a policy brief on garment working conditions.

A groundbreaking look at the transition to sound in the French Cinema.

The styles of high and pop culture come together with classical and new media in Robert Wilson's video portraits. The personalities they present refer in part to their own biographical details, but also to sources in cultural history. For example, Robert Downey Jr. plays the part of the corpse in Rembrandt's painting the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), while Brad Pitt demonstrates the expressive power of his acting with pistol and boxer shorts. Published to accompany the exhibition at ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, May – August 2010.English and German text.

This revised and updated edition of a successful and established text provides a much-needed historical overview of French cinema from its roots through to the political and social developments in the 1990s and beyond.

Examines the way in which Sophocles' play "Oedipus Tyrannus" and its hero, Oedipus, King of Thebes, were probably received in their own time and place, and relates this to twentieth-century receptions and interpretations, including those of Sigmund Freud.

Indiana is the story's heroine, a young noblewoman descended from French colonial settlers from Île Bourbon who lives in France. Indiana is married to an older ex-army officer named Colonel Delmare and suffers from the lack of passion in her life. Indiana does not love Delmare and searches for someone who will love her passionately. Her cousin Ralph is in love with her, but she overlooks him and falls in love with their well-spoken neighbor, Raymon de Ramiere. Indiana escapes the house to faithfully present herself in Raymon's apartments in the middle of the night, but they don't get along and Colonel Delmare takes Indiana to Île Bourbon. Indiana returns to France on a perilous sea journey during the French Revolution of 1830, where she reconnects with Raymon, but also with Ralph, which further complicate matters. The novel is an exploration of nineteenth-century female desire complicated by class constraints and by social codes about infidelity.

This book provides an up to date review of subnational and multicultural issues in Western multinational states.