Multiple Antiquities - Multiple Modernities
Multiple Antiquities - Multiple Modernities

Author: Gábor Klaniczay

Publisher: Campus Verlag

Published: 2011-09

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 3593391015

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Antiquity, as the term has been understood and used over the centuries by scholars, political and religious figures, and ordinary citizens, is far from a single, monolithic concept. Rather than reflecting a stable, shared understanding about the past and its meaning, the idea of antiquity is instead varying and multiple, taking on different meanings and deployed to different effects depending on the context in which it is being considered. In this volume, historians from a wide range of specialties offer a comparative assessment of the multiple perceptions of antiquity that have shaped modern European cultures and national identities, deploying a new methodological approach, histoire croisée, which considers these questions in light of the development of cultural diversity across Europe.

Dreams of Happiness
Dreams of Happiness

Author: Neil McWilliam

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-03-14

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1400887240

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Responding to the decline of the monarchy and the church in post-revolutionary France, theorists representing a wide spectrum of leftist ideologies proposed comprehensive blueprints for society that assigned a crucial role to aesthetics. In this full-length investigation of social romanticism, Neil McWilliam explores the profound impact of radical philosophies on contemporary aesthetics and art criticism, and traces efforts to conscript the arts for doctrinal ends. He highlights the complexity and diversity of systems such as Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism, Republicanism, and Christian Socialism--movements that set out to exploit the ameliorative effect of aesthetic form on human consciousness--and challenges the previous linking of social art to narrow didacticism. This book seeks an understanding both of the conventions of artistic judgment and reception and of the aims and significance of radical political ideologies. Drawing on a broad spectrum of previously neglected journalistic criticism, visual material, and archival sources, together with key political texts by figures such as Saint-Simon, Philippe Buchez, and Pierre Leroux, this work reveals an important facet of radical history and modifies received understandings of French art in the wake of Romanticism. In the process it probes the role of culture within oppositional political practice, arguing that the ultimate failure to realize a social art exposes the limits of the radicals' break with dominant discourse and their hesitancy in forging links with a culturally disenfranchised working class. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Delicious Decadence ?The Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century
Delicious Decadence ?The Rediscovery of French Eighteenth-Century Painting in the Nineteenth Century

Author: Monica Preti

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1351569929

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The history of collecting is a topic of central importance to many academic disciplines, and shows no sign of abating in popularity. As such, scholars will welcome this collection of essays by internationally recognised experts that gathers together for the first time varied and stimulating perspectives on the nineteenth-century collector and art market for French eighteenth-century art, and ultimately the formation of collections that form part of such august institutions as the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. The book is the culmination of a successful conference organised jointly between the Wallace Collection and the Louvre, on the occasion of the acclaimed exhibition Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze. Exploring themes relating to collectors, critics, markets and museums from France, England and Germany, the volume will appeal to academics and students alike, and become essential reading on any course that deals with the history of collecting, the history of taste and the nineteenth-century craze for the perceived douceur de vivre of eighteenth-century France. It also provides valuable insight into the history of the art markets and the formation of museums.

Out of Context
Out of Context

Author: Daniel Balderston

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1993-03-12

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0822383020

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In Jorge Luis Borges's finely wrought, fantastic stories, so filigreed with strange allusions, critics have consistently found little to relate to the external world, to history--in short, to reality. Out of Context corrects this shortsighted view and reveals the very real basis of the Argentine master's purported "irreality." By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study also gives us a new sense of Borges's place within the context of contemporary literature. Through a detailed examination of seven stories, Daniel Balderston shows how Borges's historical and political references, so often misread as part of a literary game, actually open up a much more complex reality than the one made explicit to the reader. Working in tension with the fantastic aspects of Borges' work, these precise references to realities outside the text illuminate relations between literature and history as well as the author's particular understanding of both. In Borges's perspective as it is revealed here, history emerges as an "other" only partially recoverable in narrative form. From what can be recovered, Balderston is able to clarify Borges's position on historical episodes and trends such as colonialism, the Peronist movement, "Western culture," militarism, and the Spanish invasion of the Americas. Informed by a wide reading of history, a sympathetic use of critical theory, and a deep understanding of Borges's work, this iconoclastic study provides a radical new approach to one of the most celebrated and—until now—hermetic authors of our time.

The Classic
The Classic

Author: Christopher Prendergast

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2007-06-21

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0191527009

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Focusing on a moment and a source in nineteenth-century France, Christopher Prendergast takes up a big question that is still with us: What is a classic? The question is, by virtue of its insistent recurrence, itself a classic question. It returns to haunt us. It provided the title of a text for French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1850 ('Qu'est-ce qu'un classique?'), as it did in the twentieth century for T.S. Eliot and John Coetzee. Centring on Sainte-Beuve in his nineteenth-century context, Prendergast's inquiry takes us historically to many places (antiquity, the middle ages, the seventeenth and eighteenth as well as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). He also provides an intellectual history that travels across multiple disciplinary territories (in addition to literary criticism and literary history, classical studies, comparative philology, historiography and political thought). Against this background, The Classic maps the evolution of Sainte-Beuve's thought from an initially cosmopolitan conception of the classic (close in spirit to Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur) to an increasingly nationalist conception, with a strong emphasis on the heritage of Latinity and France as its principal legatee. This emphasis was taken up by the extreme right in France after Sainte-Beuve's death, in a determined mobilizing of a version of the 'classic' on behalf of a proto-fascist agenda. The final chapter deals with this appropriation and ends with a question of our own about Sainte-Beuve's original question: in the light of this bleak history, perhaps the time has come to dispense with the term 'classic' altogether.