Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written, published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers, poems and prose fiction, these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time, their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture, including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric je, these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.
Inventing the Popular: Working-Class Literature and Culture in Nineteenth-Century France explores texts written, published and disseminated by a politically and socially active group of working-class writers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Through a network of exchanges featuring newspapers, poems and prose fiction, these writers embraced a vision of popular culture that represented a clear departure from more traditional oral and printed forms of popular expression; at the same time, their writing strategically resisted nascent forms of mass culture, including the daily press and the serial novel. Coming into writing at a time when Romanticism had expanded beyond the borders of the lyric je, these poets explored the social dimensions of connectivity and social relation finding interlocutors and supporters in the likes of Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Eugène Sue. The relationships they developed among themselves and the major figures of an increasingly socially-oriented Romanticism were as rich with emancipatory promise as well as with reactionary temptation. They constitute an extensive archive of everyday life and utopian anticipation that reframe social romanticism as a revelatory if problematic model of engaged writing.
Editors' Preface Dan Edelstein and Bettina Lerner Mythomania and Modernity Part I: From Nation to Republic Bettina Lerner Michelet, Mythologue Leon Sachs Teaching to the Choir: The Republican Schoolteacher and the Sanctity of Secularism Tyler Stovall The Myth of the Liberatory Republic and the Political Culture of Freedom in Imperial France Part II: Reading Revolution" " Marie-Helene Huet The Face of Disaster Dan Edelstein The Modernization of Myth: From Balzac to Sorel Edward Berenson Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand Part III: Mythical Selves Goran Blix Heroic Genesis in the "Memorial de Sainte-Helene "Natacha Allet Myth and Legend in Antonin Artaud's Theater Jean-Marie Apostolides Herge and the Myth of the Superchild Lawrence Kritzman De Gaulle's Memoires: Self-Portraiture and the Rhetoric of the Nation
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.