Bohemianism and the Cultural Field: Trilby and Tarr

Abstract

George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) trace the arc of bohemian literature, from its emergence in Henri Murger’s tales of a Parisian underclass (by 1851), through its burgeoning popularity with middle-class readers (Trilby was one of the first bestsellers in 1894), to its repudiation in Lewis’s modernist satire on the ‘bourgeois-bohemians’ of pre-War Paris (in 1918). This was also the period of the ‘autonomization’ of the cultural field discussed by Pierre Bourdieu, in which earlier systems of patronage, and the authority of established institutions, gave way to market relations and competition among the emerging avant-gardes. This essay seeks to situate Trilby and Tarr in this evolving context, to make sense of the different formations of du Maurier and Lewis as artists and writers, and to trace the ways in which social, economic and aesthetic shifts in the culture. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.