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The Gamin de Paris in nineteenth-century visual culture : Delacroix, Hugo, and the French social imaginary

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Brown, Marilyn Ruth (Author, VerfasserIn)
Document Type: Book
Language:English
Published: New York and London : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group , 2017
Series:Routledge research in art history 1
Subjects:
Online Access:Inhaltsverzeichnis
Related Items:Rezensiert in: [Rezension von: Brown, Marilyn, The Gamin de Paris in nineteenth-century visual culture, Delacroix, Hugo, and the French social imaginary]
Author Notes:Marilyn R. Brown
Description
Summary:The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity," "people," and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people," the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation
Item Description:Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-143) and index
Physical Description:xiii, 152 Seiten, 24 ungezählte Seiten Bildtafeln Illustrationen 26 cm
ISBN:1138231134
9781138231139