Popular Bohemia Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris [Unknon]

A radical reconceptualization of modernism, this book traces the appearance of the modern artist to the Paris of the 1830s and links the emergence of an enduring modernist aesthetic to the fleeting forms of popular culture. Contrary to conventional views of a private self retreating from history and modernity,Popular Bohemiashows us the modernist as a public persona parodying the stereotypes of commercial mass culture. Here we see how the modern artistalternately assuming the roles of the melodramatic hero, the urban fl?neur, the female hysteric, the tribal primitivecreated his own version of an expressive, public modernity in opposition to an increasingly repressive and conformist bourgeois culture. And here we see how a specifically modern aesthetic culture in nineteenth-century Paris came about, not in opposition to commercial popular culture, but in close alliance with it.

Popular Bohemiarevises dominant historical narratives about modernism from the perspective of a theoretically informed cultural history that spans the period between 1830 and 1914. In doing so, it reconnects the intellectual history of avant-garde art with the cultural history of bohemia and the social history of the urban experience to reveal the circumstances in which a truly modernist culture emerged.

Gluck is a fine intellectual historian whose first book on Luk?cs was in every way a triumph of scholarship. Her new book,Popular Bohemia, is at the same level and may even exceed her earlier work in terms of originality.Gluck's book is a wonderfully conceived contribution to the overhaul of our understanding of modernism that has been in full swing in many fields for some time now. Our view of literary modernism, she argues, has been distorted by taking the aloof figure of the aesthete, and self-referential art, at the turn of the twentieth century as the ostensible end-points in the emergence of modernism, and then by looking back to romanticism to trace tl#