title: A Crisis of Distinction: Reading Fin-de-Siècle Anxieties through Les Types de Paris
title: A Crisis of Distinction: Reading Fin-de-Siècle Anxieties through Les Types de Paris
titleType: Other
Creators: name: Agate, Nicky
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2014
Subjects: subject: Nineteenth century
subject: Literature and history
subject: French literature
subject: Travel writing
subject: France
subject: History
subject: Art
subject: Area studies
subject: Culture--Study and teaching

description: This dissertation combines micro-history, literary geography, urbanism, and the history of the French illustrated book. I work outwards from Les Types de Paris, a virtually ignored and chaotically hybrid collection of essays, short stories, physiologies and poetry that I position as a latter-day rewriting of the panoramic literature of the 1840s. This iteration, I argue, has to address a city that has become unheimlich for its inhabitants. Post-Haussmann, post-1870, in the throes of an Exposition universelle: this has become a city in constant flux. The volume's contributors—from Edmond de Goncourt, Mallarmé, and Maupassant to Mirbeau, Richepin, and Zola—collaborate with its illustrator-curator, Jean-François Raffaëlli to try to make sense of a city whose social, gender, and geographical boundaries are no longer fixed. The resultant visual-verbal ensemble reveals a bourgeois urban class ridden with the anxieties of modernity—from the increasing visibility and mobility of the working class, to a crisis of masculinity in the face of defeat, to the shifting social and geographical borders of the city in which it lives. Here, the panoramic format reflects the authors' desire to frame the fluid, to stay the tide of change. 

Chapter Breakdown:
1. Beasts of Burden and All-Consuming Machines 
2. The Spectacle of Science: The Foreigner in France 
3. Taming the Peripheral: The Chiffonniers of Paris 
4. Re-placing Paris: The New Topography
description: This dissertation combines micro-history, literary geography, urbanism, and the history of the French illustrated book. I work outwards from Les Types de Paris, a virtually ignored and chaotically hybrid collection of essays, short stories, physiologies and poetry that I position as a latter-day rewriting of the panoramic literature of the 1840s. This iteration, I argue, has to address a city that has become unheimlich for its inhabitants. Post-Haussmann, post-1870, in the throes of an Exposition universelle: this has become a city in constant flux. The volume's contributors—from Edmond de Goncourt, Mallarmé, and Maupassant to Mirbeau, Richepin, and Zola—collaborate with its illustrator-curator, Jean-François Raffaëlli to try to make sense of a city whose social, gender, and geographical boundaries are no longer fixed. The resultant visual-verbal ensemble reveals a bourgeois urban class ridden with the anxieties of modernity—from the increasing visibility and mobility of the working class, to a crisis of masculinity in the face of defeat, to the shifting social and geographical borders of the city in which it lives. Here, the panoramic format reflects the authors' desire to frame the fluid, to stay the tide of change. Chapter Breakdown: 1. Beasts of Burden and All-Consuming Machines 2. The Spectacle of Science: The Foreigner in France 3. Taming the Peripheral: The Chiffonniers of Paris 4. Re-placing Paris: The New Topography