Writing the City S.
1 total work
Paris in the 19th century meant Paris as the 19th century; "capital of the 19th century" in Walter Benjamin's phrase. In this book, Christopher Prendergast explores the identifications made in and about Paris - from the inspector's report and the guide book to the imaginative literature - and considers what was entailed by the competing and contradictory claims that Paris and Parisians had either acquired or lost a settled identity. "Paris and the Nineteenth Century" moves between social and cultural history, literature, painting and photography. At its heart lies a series of readings of major 19th-century texts, by Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Michelet, Flaubert, Zola, Valles, Laforgue and others. Prendergast concludes by sketching some perspectives which join the pre-modern Paris of the 19th century to the postmodern city of the late 20th century and presents a more general argument concerning the intellectual and political stakes in writing about the city today.