Opening book details…
Can I read The spectacular past : popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France on EtoBox?
The spectacular past : popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France by Samuels, Maurice is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.
What is The spectacular past : popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France about?
Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envision
Who reads The spectacular past : popular history and the novel in nineteenth-century France?
It is typically read by self-directed learners exploring a subject in depth.
Common subject areas: history, science, philosophy, social sciences.
- Author
- Samuels, Maurice
- Publisher
- Cornell University Press
- Published
- 2004
- Language
- EN
- ISBN
- 9781501729836
- Category
- nonfiction
- Subjects
- Literary Fiction, Romance, History
- Rating
- 3.75 / 5 (3 ratings)
- Updated
- 2026-03-14
Other editions & translations
More by Samuels, Maurice
Browse all works by Samuels, Maurice
Similar books
- A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford Studies in the History of Archaeology) — Margarita Díaz-Andreu García (2007)
- Women and Political Insurgency : France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century — David Barry (1996)
- Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) — Maurice Samuels (2010)
- The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France — McPherson, Heather (2001)
- Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France : Workers, Women, Peasants — Martyn Lyons (2001)
- A Social History Of Nineteenth Century France — Roger Price (1987)