19th century
A01=Vanessa R. Schwartz
archival research
Author_Vanessa R. Schwartz
boulevards
Category=DS
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSD
Category=JHBS
Category=JHM
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
city life
collective consumption
corpses
crowd
cultural history
cultural studies
entertainment
entertainment culture
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film
history
individual in society
mass media
mass press
mass society
morgue
nonfiction
panoramas
paris
pleasure
popular culture
public displays
social unity
spectacle
spectators
urban issues
urban studies
urbanization
wax museums
Product details
- ISBN 9780520221680
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Aug 1999
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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During the second half of the nineteenth century, Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle. Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards, the mass press, public displays of corpses at the morgue, wax museums, panoramas, and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials, including private and business archives, and working at the intersections of art history, literature, and cinema studies, Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation, and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd, one united in pleasure rather than protest.
Vanessa R. Schwartz is Associate Professor of History at the University of Southern California and coeditor of Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (California, 1995).
