(Ebook) Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Miranda Gill ISBN 9780199543281, 0199543283

(Ebook) Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris by Miranda Gill ISBN 9780199543281, 0199543283

What did it mean to call someone 'eccentric' in nineteenth-century
Paris? And why did breaking with convention arouse such ambivalent
responses in middle-class readers, writers, and spectators? From high
society to Bohemia and the demi-monde to the madhouse, the
scandal of nonconformism provoked anxiety, disgust, and often secre
yearning. In a culture preoccupied by the need for order ye
simultaneously drawn to the values of freedom and innovation,
eccentricity continually tested the boundaries of bourgeois identity,
ultimately becoming inseparable from it. This interdisciplinary study
charts shifting French perceptions of the anomalous and bizarre from the
1830s to the fin de siècle, focusing on three key issues.
First, during the July Monarchy eccentricity was linked to fashion
dandyism, and commodity culture; to many Parisians it epitomized the
dangerous seductions of modernity and the growing prestige of the
courtesan. Second, in the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution eccentricity
was associated with the Bohemian artists and performers who inhabited
'the unknown Paris', a zone of social exclusion which middle-class
spectators found both fascinating and repugnant. Finally, the
popularization of medical theories of national decline in the latter
part of the century led to decreasing tolerance for individual
difference, and eccentricity was interpreted as a symptom of hidden
insanity and deformity. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including
etiquette manuals, fashion magazines, newspapers, novels, and
psychiatric treatises, the study highlights the central role of gender
in shaping perceptions of eccentricity. It provides new readings of
works by major French writers and illuminates both well-known and
neglected figures of Parisian modernity, from the courtesan and Bohemian
to the female dandy and circus freak.