Figures Of Ill Repute

Ubiquitous in the streets and brothels of nineteenth-century Paris, the prostitute was even more so in the novels and paintings of the time. Charles Bernheimer discusses how these representations of the sexually available woman express male ambivalence about desire, money, class, and the body. Interweaving close textual analysis with historical anecdote and theoretical speculation, Bernheimer demonstrates how the formal properties of art can serve strategically to control anxious fantasies about female sexual power. Drawing on methods derived from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, social history, feminist theory, and narrative analysis, this interdisciplinary classic (available now for the first time in paperback) was awarded Honorable Mention in 1990 for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for the best book of criticism.

Bizet's Carmen is probably the best known opera of the standard repertoire, yet its very familiarity often prevents us from approaching it with the seriousness it deserves. This handbook explores the opera in a number of contexts, bringing to the surface the controversies over gender, race, class and musical propriety that greeted its premiere and that have been rekindled by the recent spate of film versions. Beginning with a study of the Mérimée story by Peter Robinson and an examination of the social tensions in nineteenth-century France that inform both that story and the opera, the book traces the latter through its genesis and reception. The central core of the book presents a close reading of the opera that offers new interpretive possibilities. The handbook concludes with discussions of four films based on the opera: Carmen Jones and the versions of Carmen by Carlos Saura, Peter Brook, and Francesco Rosi. The volume contains a bibliography, music examples, and a synopsis.

Stephen Snyder examines Kafu's fiction in terms of narrative strategy, placing him squarely within some of the most important currents of literary modernism--at the nexus of Naturalism and the largely antithetical development of the modernist reflexive novel.

In this study of prostitution in late imperial Austria, Nancy M. Wingfield brings to light the real women behind contemporary constructions of prostitution, with the aim of restoring their historical agency and placing them in their larger social context

"Eugene Sue (1804-57), like his contemporary Alexandre Dumas pere, was one of the most successful writers of his time. Les Mysteres de Paris, the novel for which he is most remembered, became a publishing sensation. In its serial form, it took the public by storm - readers fought for copies of the next instalment - and in book form its print-run reached an unprecedented 60,000. Christopher Prendergast's study engages with the problematic of emerging forms of popular literature on the basis of a specific hypothesis: that Les Mysteres de Paris, written and published in serial form, was, through the pressure of Sue's reader-correspondents (many of them barely literate), a collective production, 'written by the people for the people'. Prendergast examines the phenomenon of popular literature and reader response in the nineteenth century to illuminate larger issues in the sociology of literature."

In Expositions, Philippe Hamon leads us on an engaging intellectual stroll through the spaces and representations of the nineteenth-century French metropolis. Inspired by the cultural histories of Walter Benjamin and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Expositions explores the spatial and cultural logic of Haussmann's sweeping Paris boulevards, classic novels by Balzac and Zola, the Bon March� department store, and the poetry of Baudelaire.

Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.

'Reclaiming Feminine Agency' identifies female agency as a central theme of recent feminist scholarship & offers 23 essays on artists & issues from the Renaissance to the present, written in the 1990s & after.