In nineteenth-century Paris, passionate involvement with revolution turned the city into an engrossing object of cultural speculation. For writers caught between an explosive past and a bewildering future, revolution offered a virtuoso metaphor by which the city could be known and a vital principle through which it could be portrayed. In this engaging book, Priscilla Ferguson locates the originality and modernity of nineteenth-century French literature in the intersection of the city with revolution. A cultural geography, "Paris as Revolution" 'reads' the nineteenth-century city not in literary works alone but across a broad spectrum of urban icons and narratives.Ferguson moves easily between literary and cultural history and between semiotic and sociological analysis to underscore the movement and change that fueled the powerful narratives defining the century, the city, and their literature.
In her understanding and reconstruction of the guidebooks of Mercier, Hugo, Valles, and others, alongside the novels of Flaubert, Hugo, Valles, and Zola, Ferguson reveals that these works are themselves revolutionary performances, ones that challenged the modernizing city even as they transcribed its emergence.
- ISBN10 0520208870
- ISBN13 9780520208872
- Publish Date 20 June 1997 (first published 23 November 1994)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 2 April 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of California Press
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 267
- Language English