Product details
- ISBN 9780271083568
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jul 2019
- Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Jules Michelet, one of France’s most influential historians and a founder of modern historical practice, was a passionate viewer and relentless interpreter of the visual arts. In this book, Michèle Hannoosh examines the crucial role that art writing played in Michelet’s work and shows how it decisively influenced his theory of history and his view of the practice of the historian.
The visual arts were at the very center of Michelet’s conception of historiography. He filled his private notes, public lectures, and printed books with discussions of artworks, which, for him, embodied the character of particular historical moments. Michelet believed that painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving bore witness to histories that frequently went untold; that they expressed key ideas standing behind events; and that they articulated concepts that would come to fruition only later.
This groundbreaking reevaluation of Michelet’s approach to history elucidates how writing about art provided a model for the historian’s relation to, and interpretation of, the past, and thus for a new type of historiography—one that acknowledges and enacts the historian’s own implication in the history he or she tells.
Michèle Hannoosh is Professor of French at the University of Michigan. She is the author of, among other books, Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity and translator of Eugène Delacroix’s Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832: The Travel Notebooks and Other Writings, both published by Penn State University Press.
