Aristocracy and the Modern Imagination PDF Download

Author: Charles A. Riley
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584651512
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Modernism generally signifies the efforts of late 19th century European painters, writers, musicians and philosophers who consciously broke with tradition. This is an examination of what that meant for those aristocrats who were also modernists.

Author: Ellis Wasson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137040297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Ellis Wasson offers one of the first comprehensive studies of the European ruling class during the 19th and 20th centuries. Distilling a wealth of recent research, Wasson analyses the role of aristocracy in modern times, focusing on the tensions that exist between egalitarian values and the way elites shape society. Wasson explodes myths and jettisons stereotypes in sweeping coverage that takes the story from the Congress of Vienna to Stalingrad. The study recounts the change from the genteel world of court balls to Café Society and finally on to Eurotrash. It also contrasts the paradox of continued aristocratic social power and cultural leadership with the gradual decline in their political authority. Aristocracy and the Modern World covers key topics, such as: - The fabulous wealth of the great magnates - The relationship between servants and masters - Interaction with the middle classes - Concepts of honour - Culture, recreation and gender - Local authority and national power. Lively and authoritative, the book reviews developments in Scandinavia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, Italy and Spain as well as in Britain, Germany and Russia. It is essential reading for all those with an interest in modern European history.

Author: Adeline Grand-Clément
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350169749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This volume tackles the role of smell, under-explored in relation to the other senses, in the modern rejection, reappraisal and idealisation of antiquity. Among the senses olfaction in particular has often been overlooked in classical reception studies due to its evanescent nature, which makes this sense difficult to apprehend in its past instantiations. And yet, the smells associated with a given figure or social group convey a rich imagery which in turn connotes specific values: perfumes, scents and foul odours both reflect and mould the ways in which a society thinks or acts. Smells also help to distinguish between male and female, citizens and strangers, and play an important role during rituals. The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination focuses on the representation of ancient smells - both enticing and repugnant - in the visual and performative arts from the late 18th century up to the 21st century. The individual contributions explore painting, sculpture, literature and film, but also theatrical performance, museum exhibitions, advertising, television series, historical reenactment and graphic novels, which have all played a part in reshaping modern audiences' perceptions and experiences of the antique.

Author: Stefania Michelucci
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476674876
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
As traditional social hierarchies fall away, ever steeper levels of economic inequality and the entrenchment of new class distinctions lend a new glamor to the idea of aristocracy: witness the worldwide popularity of Downton Abbey, or the seemingly insatiable public fascination with the private lives of the British royal family. This collection of new essays investigates the enduring attraction to the icon of the aristocrat and the spectacle of aristocratic society. It traces the ambivalent reactions the aristocracy provokes and the needs (political, ideological, psychological, and otherwise) it caters to in modern times when the economic power of the landed classes have been eroded and their political role curtailed. In this interdisciplinary collection, aristocracy is considered from multiple viewpoints, including British and American literature, European history and politics, cultural studies, linguistics, visual arts, music, and media studies.

Author: Constance Brittain Bouchard
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801485480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Medieval society was dominated by its knights and nobles. The literature created in medieval Europe was primarily a literature of knightly deeds, and the modern imagination has also been captured by these leaders and warriors. This book explores the nature of the nobility, focusing on France in the High Middle Ages (11th-13th centuries). Constance Brittain Bouchard examines their families; their relationships with peasants, townspeople, and clerics; and the images of them fashioned in medieval literary texts. She incorporates throughout a consideration of noble women and the nobility's attitude toward women. Research in the last two generations has modified and expanded modern understanding of who knights and nobles were; how they used authority, war, and law; and what position they held within the broader society. Even the concepts of feudalism, courtly love, and chivalry, once thought to be self-evident aspects of medieval society, have been seriously questioned. Bouchard presents bold new interpretations of medieval literature as both reflecting and criticizing the role of the nobility and their behavior. She offers the first synthesis of this scholarship in accessible form, inviting general readers as well as students and professional scholars to a new understanding of aristocratic role and function.

Author: Byron Hollinshead
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030727764X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
“What is the scene or incident in European history that you would like to have witnessed-and why?” With lively and detailed accounts of some of the most dramatic events in history, some of our finest historical writers now turn their attention to Europe in this companion volume to I Wish I'd Been There: Twenty Historians Bring to Life the Dramatic Events that Changed America. Guided by peerless scholars such as Paul Kennedy, John Keegan, Ross King, Freeman Dyson, and Katherine Duncan-Jones, readers will be transported to the signing of Magna Carta, the Versailles Conference, the German surrender in WWII on Luneburg Heath, and other key turning points in the drama of European history. These essays encompass two millenia and an entire continent, addressing issues of politics, law, religion, peace and war, science and the arts, and social change, all telescoped into finely observed narratives. The result is an historical pageant of characters and episodes that will attract and delight all readers of history.

Author: Adam Parkes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192691287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
During a modern age that saw the expansion of its democracy, the fading of its empire, and two world wars, Britain's hereditary aristocracy was pushed from the centre to the margins of the nation's affairs. Widely remarked on by commentators at the time, this radical redrawing of the social and political map provoked a newly intensified fascination with the aristocracy among modern writers. Undone by history, the British aristocracy and its Anglo-Irish cousins were remade by literary modernism. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is about the results of that remaking. The book traces the literary consequences of the modernist preoccupation with aristocracy in the works of Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and others writing in Britain and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. Combining an historical focus on the decades between the two world wars with close attention to the verbal textures and formal structures of literary texts, Adam Parkes asks: What did the decline of the British aristocracy do for modernist writers? What imaginative and creative opportunities did the historical fate of the aristocracy precipitate in writers of the new democratic age? Exploring a range of feelings, affects, and attitudes that modernist authors associated with the aristocracy in the interwar period—from stupidity, boredom, and nostalgia to sophistication, cruelty, and kindness—the book also asks what impact this subject-matter has on the form and style of modernist texts, and why the results have appealed to readers then and now. In tackling such questions, Parkes argues for a reawakening of curiosity about connections between class, status, and literature in the modernist period.

Author: Robert Vanderlan
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Publishing tycoon Henry Luce famously championed many conservative causes, and his views as a capitalist and cold warrior were reflected in his glossy publications. Republican Luce aimed squarely for the Middle American masses, yet his magazines attracted intellectually and politically ambitious minds who were moved by the democratic aspirations of the New Deal and the left. Much of the best work of intellectuals such as James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, Daniel Bell, John Hersey, and Walker Evans owes a great debt to their experiences writing for Luce and his publications. Intellectuals Incorporated tells the story of the serious writers and artists who worked for Henry Luce and his magazines Time, Fortune, and Life between 1923 and 1960, the period when the relationship between intellectuals, the culture industry, and corporate capitalism assumed its modern form. Countering the notions that working for corporations means selling out and that the true life of the mind must be free from institutional ties, historian Robert Vanderlan explains how being embedded in the corporate culture industries was vital to the creative efforts of mid-century thinkers. Illuminating their struggles through careful research and biographical vignettes, Vanderlan shows how their contributions to literary journalism and the wider political culture would have been impossible outside Luce's media empire. By paying attention to how these writers and photographers balanced intellectual aspiration with journalistic perspiration, Intellectuals Incorporated advances the idea of the intellectual as a connected public figure who can engage and criticize organizations from within.

Author: Paul Elmer More
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Author: Benedetta Craveri
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681373408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 617

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Book Description
An enthralling work of history about the Libertine generation that came up during—and was eventually destroyed by—the French Revolution. The Last Libertines, as Benedetta Craveri writes in her preface to the book, is the story of a group of “seven aristocrats whose youth coincided with the French monarchy’s final moment of grace—a moment when it seemed to the nation’s elite that a style of life based on privilege and the spirit of caste might acknowledge the widespread demand for change, and in doing so reconcile itself with Enlightenment ideals of justice, tolerance, and citizenship.” Here we meet seven emblematic characters, whom Craveri has singled out not only for “the romantic character of their exploits and amours—but also by the keenness with which they experienced this crisis in the civilization of the ancien régime, of which they themselves were the emblem.” Displaying the aristocratic virtues of “dignity, courage, refinement of manners, culture, [and] wit,” the Duc de Lauzun, the Vicomte de Ségur, the Duc de Brissac, the Comte de Narbonne, the Chevalier de Boufflers, the Comte de Ségur, and the Comte de Vaudreuil were at the same time “irreducible individualists” and true “sons of the Enlightenment,” all of them ambitious to play their part in bringing around the great changes that were in the air. When the French Revolution came, however, they found themselves condemned to poverty, exile, and in some cases execution. Telling the parallel lives of these seven dazzling but little-remembered historical figures, Craveri brings the past to life, powerfully dramatizing a turbulent time that was at once the last act of a now-vanished world and the first act of our own.