Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in - download pdf or read online

What did it suggest to name a person 'eccentric' in nineteenth-century Paris? And why did breaking with conference arouse such ambivalent responses in middle-class readers, writers, and spectators? From excessive society to Bohemia and the demi-monde to the madhouse, the scandal of nonconformism provoked anxiousness, disgust, and infrequently secre craving. In a tradition preoccupied via the necessity for order ye at the same time attracted to the values of freedom and innovation, eccentricity consistently demonstrated the limits of bourgeois identification, finally turning into inseparable from it. This interdisciplinary examine charts moving French perceptions of the anomalous and weird from the 1830s to the fin de siècle, targeting 3 key matters. First, through the July Monarchy eccentricity was once associated with style dandyism, and commodity tradition; to many Parisians it epitomized the harmful seductions of modernity and the transforming into status of the courtesan. moment, within the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution eccentricity used to be linked to the Bohemian artists and performers who inhabited 'the unknown Paris', a sector of social exclusion which middle-class spectators chanced on either interesting and repugnant. ultimately, the popularization of clinical theories of nationwide decline within the latter a part of the century ended in lowering tolerance for person distinction, and eccentricity was once interpreted as a symptom of hidden madness and deformity. Drawing on a variety of assets, together with etiquette manuals, type magazines, newspapers, novels, and psychiatric treatises, the research highlights the imperative position of gender in shaping perceptions of eccentricity. It presents new readings of works via significant French writers and illuminates either recognized and missed figures of Parisian modernity, from the courtesan and Bohemian to the feminine dandy and circus freak.