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 envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Cornell University Press
ISBN-13
9780801442490
eBay Product ID (ePID)
94673887
Product Key Features
Author
Maurice Samuels
Publication Name
The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France
Format
Hardcover
Language
English
Subject
History
Publication Year
2004
Type
Textbook
Number of Pages
296 Pages
Dimensions
Item Height
229mm
Item Width
152mm
Item Weight
28g
Additional Product Features
Title_Author
Maurice Samuels
Topic
Literature
Country/Region of Manufacture
United States
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