Late Nineteenth-century Paris Research Articles

Cabaret and decency: how contemporary definitions of cabaret are shaped by censorship

The abundant ‘cabaret’ events that populate London’s contemporary entertainment scene strategically adopt specific structures and aesthetics. Common points of reference include the Weimar Republic, Berlin clubs of the 1920’s, ‘salacious’ female nudity, ‘outrageous’ camp reveals and inevitable references to Bob Fosse’s ‘Cabaret’. The events often promise to provide a ‘high quality’ drinking and dining experience. In this way ‘nostalgia’ can be turned into financial success. This formulaic approach defines the contemporary understanding of cabaret, omitting vital aspects of the genre while turning it into a purely commercial commodity. My artistic practice as research interrogates the experimental nature of the cabaret of late nineteenth century Paris within a contemporary British context. Setting itself apart from the allure of ‘flesh and cash’ of the West End cabaret, Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret, regularly programmed at Hoxton Hall, London, since 2016, focuses on exploring an updated experience of European cabaret within the abandoned British Music Hall and Variety tradition. The wider cultural discourse fails to report on the possibility of different approaches to cabaret. I will draw on particular examples from my practice – how a 60-something performer clad in Y-fronts, for example, was regarded by a certain audience as obscene – to explore the subtleties of contemporary censorship and what it says about our cultural landscape. The ‘body reveal’ – one of the commercial selling points of West End cabaret replica productions – becomes unacceptable in the different context of Ms. Paolini’s Phantasmagoria Cabaret. This article examines how censorship operates in relation to contemporary experimental cabaret, providing an alternative account of the contemporary development of traditional cabaret and suggesting that there are different angles from which to approach discussion of the genre.

A haunted world: Animism, spirits and sorcery as the work of art

Animist lifeways throughout time and across cultures recognize and celebrate a sympoietic world peopled by many types of beings beyond the human. This world is considered as equally inward as it is material – indeed, ensouled – a thoroughly ‘haunted’ world of interchangeable and entangled spirits and bodies, or what I call the sorcerous quality of such a living cosmos following Deleuze and Guattari. Such a cosmovision, long considered erroneous and ‘primitive’ by the rationalist West, has seen a recent resurgence of interest and reconsideration by so-called western thought in anthropology and elsewhere. However, the presence and reality of spirits and other immaterial forces that animism embraces pose great epistemological problems for the western stance. Specifically, it is troubled by the work of sorcery and by sorcerers themselves, those who participate in the a-logical, dreamlike becomings that blur the boundaries of what is, what is actualized and what is in potentia. In an attempt to navigate this strange dimension of life, this essay will argue that the work of sorcery, as it is understood and practised by animist lifeways, is active and reserved deep within the western ‘tradition’ as the work of art. This will be evidenced in the words and work of artist Robert Smithson as they relate to the poétes maudits of late nineteenth-century Paris, the Lakota heyókȟa, Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism and Tim Ingold’s ‘one world anthropology’.

Parisian Masculinities Revisited

Both Michael Marrinan’s Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872–1887 and Mary Hunter’s The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris consider painting from the same place and period, as well as conceptions of realism and naturalism, and constructions of masculinity. The ways that they do this attest not only to the diversity of arts practices operating within those arenas but also to the very different modes of art historical inquiry that address them. Gustave Caillebotte: Painting the Paris of Naturalism, 1872–1887 is a long-awaited contribution to Impressionist studies, and the result of decades of research. Through extensive work in the Paris notary archives and careful study of little-known and privately held paintings, Marrinan offers a cohesive picture of the artist’s life and career, answering biographical questions that have long plagued scholars. Twelve short and clear chapters are accompanied by over 130 colour reproductions. Given that Caillebotte’s catalogue raisonnée is almost exclusively black and white, and that the majority of his work resides in private collections and is therefore difficult to access, this is a significant achievement that greatly expands our understanding of the scope of Caillebotte’s practice. The application of a consistent authorial voice addressed to the entire span of the artist’s career is also noteworthy. Caillebotte holds a unique place in histories of nineteenth-century art, which has given rise to bold arguments from some of Impressionism’s most eminent scholars but few single-authored, book-length studies. Caillebotte’s best-known paintings do not include the hallmarks of what has come to be identified as Impressionist style. His independent wealth has often been considered the cause of an inconsistent oeuvre, which allowed at times for striking innovation in composition and subject choice but, on other occasions, work that has been described in terms of a rather amateur quality. His notoriously sketchy biography and striking pictures have been the subject of essays and chapters that have included interpretations related to Caillebotte’s sexual identity, his transgression of gendered norms of representation, and his contested relationship to class.1 While Marrinan’s project may lack the radical stakes and polemical energy that drove some of those earlier interventions, his account of Caillebotte’s work nonetheless provides a touchstone for coming to terms with it.

The conférencier in the purple robe: Chen Jitong and Qing cultural diplomacy in late nineteenth-century Paris

ABSTRACT The establishment of Chinese legations abroad in the late Qing coincided with the emergence of a number of learned societies and transnational knowledge communities in the late nineteenth century. To what extent did the Chinese diplomats residing in Europe engage with these organizations in their interactions with the West? This paper examines an understudied aspect of late Qing foreign relations by tracing the activities of the diplomat-writer Chen Jitong (1852–1907) in several learned societies in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s. While serving as a secretary at the Qing legation in Paris, Chen also became a member of several Parisian learned societies (sociétés savantes). By enthusiastically participating in the meetings of these societies, contributing to their official journals, and delivering speeches at international congresses organized by these groups during the 1889 World’s Fair, Chen established a presence for Qing China in several nongovernmental international organizations. While the intellectual foci of these learned societies ranged from folklore studies, to architectural preservation, to ethnography, Chen contributed his own unique perspective and sensitivity as a Qing literatus in his representation of Chinese society and culture, which he also successfully fused in his writings about China for a French audience. I argue that Chen’s participation in the French and international learned societies should be understood as a form of late Qing cultural diplomacy, where what was at stake was not political sovereignty but the right of Chinese self-representation and contending notions of civilization.

Japan’s Queer Modernity

Japan’s Queer Modernity Jos Lavery Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities. Christopher Reed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pp. 440. $105.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper); $34.99 (eBook). Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching. Carrie J. Preston. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 352. $35.00 (cloth); $26.00 (paper); $34.99 (eBook). Two excellent new books explore the impact of Japanese art and culture on the emerging gender formations of Western modernism. Which is already a little odd, since there have been, until the present, pretty much zero book-length studies of that theme, and there are a few more to come in the next few years—including (full disclosure and god willing) one by me. Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, and Journeys in Teaching by Carrie J. Preston and Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities by Christopher Reed together comprise a persuasive case that, in certain important respects, Western modernists learned their queer identity practices from their interpretations of Japan. These books bear a family resemblance to work published on modernism and China a decade ago by Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, Haun Saussy, Steven Yao and others in Sinographies: Writing China, which explored the imaginative, aesthetic, and (occasionally) political consequences of Orientalist writing, circumventing the pedantic objection that such interpretations were, by and large, wrong.1 Indeed, in certain ways these scholars sought to recover Orientalist wrongness itself as a critical tool to be wielded against the orthodoxies of Western-aesthetic chauvinism. Preston and Reed sharpen the point still further. Not only did major European modernists (such as Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin) turn to the Orient to shake off the fusty residues of Victorian rationalism, but a minor modernist tradition turned to Japan to subvert the Sinocentrism and masculinism of the main modernist stream. The two authors marshal different evidence towards a version of this argument. [End Page 193] Reed recovers a breathtakingly rich and original archive of artists, writers, and collectors proximate to, but just outside of, our familiar narratives (Henri Cernuschi, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Bernard Leach, and Mark Tobey are some of the most powerfully described). Preston, conversely, focuses on the queering and minoritizing consequences of teaching a more recognizable canon (Pound, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett) in such a way as to heighten its exoticism. Addressing overlapping but distinct archives, then, these two books also present two very different methods of assessing transcultural connections: labors of very different kinds of love. Learning to Kneel offers anecdotes both pedagogical and vividly personal: the author’s own body is frequently exhibited as a source of meaning and authority. Early on, Preston compares herself to the waki character in a noh drama, “persistently and self-consciously kneeling at the side of the stage, aware of my complicated position as a Westerner, woman, and scholar” (22). Each chapter includes detailed reportage from the author’s classrooms—both the ones she convenes as a professor of literature (whose students, indeed, themselves appear as recurring guest stars) and the ones in which she submits, in the pose that the book’s title describes, to the discipline of noh practice itself. Reed’s scholarly pose, if it makes sense to talk in those terms, is the much more familiar one of expertise, specifically here of three Western art scenes (late nineteenth-century Paris, turn-of-the-century Boston, and mid-twentieth-century Seattle), hubs of japoniste activity, sociality, and creativity. The microcosmic approach serves Reed well: Bachelor Japanists teems with suggestive detail, biographical narrative, and tittle-tattle, and artfully told history, and is by far the most thorough cultural history of modernist japonisme to date. There is a different kind of personal disclosure throughout: Reed’s own photographs, lovingly exhibited. And these books position themselves in relation to existing scholarship differently. The originality of Preston’s approach endows each of her readings with a powerful vitality, even at some distance from prevailing scholarly protocols; though more conventional in one sense, Reed displays an effective mastery of a scholarly field whose coordinates were set by Earl Miner. Indeed, by re-orienting the question of “modernism and Orientalism” back towards Japan, both...

Kathryn Simpson. Review of "The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris" by Mary Hunter.

Kathryn Simpson. Review of "The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris" by Mary Hunter.

Rachel G. Fuchs (1939–2016)

Rachel G. Fuchs (1939–2016)

« Les Suicides par misère à Paris » à la fin du xixe siècle

Late Nineteenth-Century Paris saw a spate of suicides, including a series of family suicides, i.e. suicides of parents and children, which have been attributed to poverty. “Poverty” in this context can refer to utter destitution, a reversal of fortune, or, in some cases, a more complex set of economic factors. In 1836, the authorities had introduced “poverty/reversal of fortune” as one of the categories of motives used to classify individual cases of suicide. In spite of the fact that poverty was indeed widespread in Paris, reducing suicide to poverty makes for crude sociologizing and ignores constants such as individual psychopathology and the occurrence of a depressed mood at the time of suicidal acts.

Between patriotism and internationalism

When the Musée du Luxembourg was founded in 1818, it was conceived as a museum for contemporary paintings by French artists whose work had been acquired by the state. It was rooted in a patriotic attitude and did not concern itself with foreign art. During the second half of the century, however, the concept of an international collection came to be adopted. This article sheds light on the origins of these international ambitions that were closely intertwined with nationalistic attitudes in late nineteenth-century Paris. The aspiration for a national museum of contemporary art with an international collection arose on one hand from a universal vision, bringing together all artistic expression, and on the other hand from a nationalistic idea, concerned with the affirmation of France’s superiority over other countries.

Hysteria Manifest: Cultural Lives of a Great Disorder

HYSTERICAL writes Cecily Devereux in this issue's opening essay, back (41). Indeed, past five years alone have provided us with peculiarly frequent cultural manifestations of great disorder (1): a pathology famously invented in late nineteenth century Paris by Jean-Martin Charcot at Salpetriere Hospital (Didi-Huberman), amorphous illness that became, through Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer's Studies in Hysteria (1895), the embryonic moment of psychoanalysis (Bowlby xvi). Recently, hysteria has surfaced onscreen in films including Alice Winocour's Augustine (2012), David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011), and Tanya Wexler's Hysteria (2011); onstage in Sarah Ruhl's 2009 Pulitzer-nominated In Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) and a 2013 London revival of Terry Johnson's Hysteria, first produced in 1993 (Spencer); in widespread media coverage of a late 2012 outbreak of mass disorder among female high school students in Le Roy, New York (Dominus); and in an Amazon-produced television series inspired by Le Roy case--Hysteria (2014)--which premiered, auspiciously, as editors were compiling this issue. (2) appears to be a sudden cultural reinvestment in hysteria coupled with a puzzling instance of corporeal materializations invites broad, provocative question, as posed by Devereux in her essay: What does mean when hysteria erupts into cultural space (21)? Recognizing that we cannot wholly pin down a concept that circulates in defiant resistance to definition, this issue understands hysteria as a diagnostic trope assigned to a series of symptoms--performed, manifested, and/or expressed at level of body--and functioning in every case as an index of cultural norms that hysteria always exceeds and sometimes resists. Today, hysteria commonly circulates with reference to collective and individual social performances of excessive behaviour, and although has been by and large disarticulated from gender and medical discourse hysteria remains haunted by its history and etymology. (3) In fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), hysteria is housed as Conversion Disorder (Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder), which encompasses symptoms including weakness or paralysis, abnormal movement, swallowing symptoms, speech symptoms, attacks or seizures, anesthesia or sensory loss, special sensory symptoms, and mixed symptoms. The DSM estimates that persistent symptoms occur in two to five people per one hundred thousand per year and that disorder is two to three times more common amongst women. Interestingly, hysteria has had a tenacious if not consistently named presence in DSM's history; four of five DSM editions use language of conversion to depict hysteria (DSM I in 1952, DSM III in 1980, DSM IV in 1994, DSM IV-TR in 2000, DSM V in 2013) with exception to this pattern being DSM II (1968) which uses language of hysterical neurosis It is as though we have never quite done with hysteria, Rachel Bowlby points out in her introduction to 2004 edition of Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria; it is always, repeatedly, necessary to return to it, to see what lacked or promised, to try to understand what is going on in its own apparently unprompted return in present time (xviii). In 2012, inspired by our shared experience two years prior in Cecily Devereux's graduate seminar, Hysteria: Cultural Texts at University of Alberta, we--the editors--found ourselves intrigued and perplexed by what seemed to be a renewed fascination with hysteria on behalf of our popular imaginary. We sought to perform task Bowlby describes: to probe, through lens of hysteria's contemporary materializations, cultural desires and anxieties that great disorder's returns and resurfacings seem to index. In our call for papers, we declared that issue aims to read hysteria's present--its current representations, manifestations, embodiments, deployments, and iterations--while drawing on its diverse genealogies and violent, tangled past; we aspired to challenge hysteria's grand histories and unearth its minor ones, defy myths of hysteria's origins, teleology, progress, and its ties to medico-scientific objectivity, while emphasizing its present-day potency (Hysteria Manifest). …

Seeing Hysteria: A Case, A Study

Seeing Hysteria:A Case, A Study Ela Przybylo, with photographs by Ela Przybylo and Michael Holly I come to hysteria lost, confused, detached. Hysteria’s “disappearance,” its current fragmentation, desensationalizes the hysterical body (Micale, 1993). And all those women depicted-invented by the “great optical machine” of the Salpêtrière hospital in late nineteenth-century Paris, by the Salpêtrière’s veritable “image factory,” become fixed (Didi-Huberman 9, 30). Who were they? What did they say? Where did they go? Much of this information is either lost, as most personal histories are, or occluded by the auteur of hysteria, Doctor Charcot himself, founder of the Salpêtrière’s neurology clinic, for he did not like listening, only seeing (Marneffe 75, 77). Described by Sigmund Freud, who was one of his pupils and admirers, as a “visuel”—a man who knows through seeing—Jean-Martin Charcot, along with one of his right-wing men, photographer Paul Régnard, ate lives up, processing them through the twin medico-photographic project of the Salpêtrière hospital (Freud, “Charcot” 12). Augustine was one such life. As one famous hysteric who went through the optical machine of the Salpêtrière, Augustine, like many hysterics, was put under hypnosis and under ether and chloroform. The photographs taken of her were calotypes, executed with a large format camera. These photographs were both posed and “photoshopped” using painting [End Page 177] techniques: the hysterics themselves, the backgrounds, and the final photograph were each in turn regulated by means of paint. In other words, all these elements collaborated to create the hysteria that we can, today, see on paper. These photographs became the very proof of hysteria. As historian Sander Gilman comments writing on hysteria, “[d]isease is only real if it is universal. And it is universal only if it can be seen and the act of seeing reproduced” (379). But while there was the hypnosis, the ether and chloroform, the photographic staging, flash, and subsequent retouching work, Augustine was there as well and she was not mute, and she was not passive (Didi-Huber-man 215, Baer, Marneffe 84). It took skill, reflex, and probably cunning to be “the star model for a whole concept of hysteria” (Didi-Huberman 117). And Augustine used her histrionic skills, finally, after the masterful execution of many poses, after at least seventeen snaps of the shutter, to “put an end to her existence as a ‘case,’ ” to dress up as a man and walk out of Charcot’s “living pathological museum” (Marneffe 79, Didi-Huberman 276, Charcot 3). So, hysteria, and most especially Augustine’s hysteria, was staged, in a very complex way, by the medico-photographic institution of the Salpêtrière: by the lights, the camera, the props, the flash, the photographer, the physician, and Augustine—the hysteric—herself. It was a collusion of all these forces, and probably many more, that led to the invention of Augustine’s hysteria and perhaps hysteria more broadly. The process of opening the shutter on myself (by way of someone else) is an exercise in patience. I am not Augustine, I do not wish to be, and I do not wish to pretend to be. But Augustine, whom so many see, needed to be placed, visually, in a more intricate web. She never acted in a vacuum; her performance had an entirely different dynamic of agency. The patient and physician spiraled off into hysterical plateaus together. They needed one another; they fueled one another’s performance. Elisabeth Bronfen speaks of the “murky enmeshment of mutual consent, mutual deceit, and mutual desire” (174). But that was not all, it was not just physician and patient; the scene was further complicated by the technologies of photography—the lights, the flash, the backdrop, the camera—which were there as well. And then there was the photographer (here—Régnard), Charcot’s middleman, and who knows what other characters appeared on set. There is no “Augustine, the hysteric” without the others. Speaking of individual agency and individual performance, in the photographic landscapes of hysteria, is insufficient. My mirror mimics Augustine’s gaze, it reminds us of the mess of physician...

The spectacular anus of Joseph Pujol: Recovering the Pétomane’s unique historic context

Joseph Pujol, the ‘Pétomane’ performed to packed audiences at the Moulin Rouge in the early 1890s. By 1906 one of his contemporaries would remark that ‘this artist’s specialty was no longer in fashion’. When legal battles occurred between Pujol and the Moulin Rouge, newspaper commentaries were filled with hilarity that a man whose anus was the source of his income was now trying to gain a fortune from it. What might the spectacular anus of Pujol, and its pecuniary trials and tribulations, tell us about bodily imagination in late nineteenth-century France? Pujol’s idiosyncratic career has rarely been considered as an historical object; and when it has, the gaze has been light-hearted and filled with puns, much like those that surrounded him in his lifetime. But if the temptation to giggle is resisted for a moment, the Pétomane can teach us much about symbolic meanings that were ascribed to the anus in late nineteenth-century Paris.

Disrupted Perspectives: Interpreting »Friends« by Hanna Hirsch-Pauli

This article interprets the disrupted perspectives in Hanna Hirsch-Pauli's large scale painting Vanner (Friends) from 1900-1907. When Hirsch-Pauli turns to her living room in 1900 as a setting for ...

The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815–2007

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical transformation in the recent period and interpret this as resulting from the rise of liability insurance provided by rating agencies. Underwriters have given up their former role as gatekeepers of liquidity and certification agencies to become aggressive competitors in a new speculative grade market.

Paris and the Quest for a National Stage in Meiji Japan and Late-Qing China

Two models in late nineteenth-century Paris foreground the ideological and dramaturgical connections between colonial nationalism in the West and theatre’s role in nation building in Meiji Japan and late Qing China. The first involves manifestations of French nationalism after the Franco-Prussian War as witnessed by Japanese and Chinese diplomats in the 1870s, in particular the Paris Opéra and a panorama titled The Siege of Paris. Such firsthand experiences led to an effort to create national theatres out of traditional theatrical forms. The second instance involves two French colonial war plays seen in 1893 by the Japanese new drama star Kawakami Otojirō, who subsequently appropriated them to stage the First Sino-Japanese War, thus providing a blueprint for performing nationalism in the burgeoning Western-style theatres in Japan and China. Siyuan Liu is a Franklin Fellow and visiting assistant professor at the University of Georgia. He received his PhD in theatre and performance studies from University of Pittsburgh and has published several research articles on modern Chinese and Japanese theatre in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, and Text & Presentation.

The Nation as a Community Born of War? Symbolic Strategies and Popular Reception of Public Statues in Late Nineteenth-Century Western European Capitals

The genesis and development of Western European nationalism is widely connected to the notion of the nation as emerged from war. This paper focuses on that cultural combination in terms of the symbols and programmatic rhetoric employed in commemorative rituals surrounding public statues—mainly in honour of military personnel—in late nineteenth-century Paris, London and Berlin. As the experience of a total war lay still ahead, the national heroes elevated on plinths besides existing war memorials were not intended to express personal mourning or to manage bereavement. They were erected as morally charged expressions of specific national ideals. Based on a sample of some twenty public statues in Paris, London and Berlin, this paper identifies three strategies of intentional manipulation: compensating for military defeat by alternative interpretive patterns in France, overwriting the competing claims of different conceptions of nationhood in Prussia-Germany, and legitimising the nation-state on an imperial scale in Britain. Comparison of these three cases substantiates the claim that there were three ‘special paths’ for legitimising the nation through war, each dependent on historical contingencies (such as the trauma of defeat or experiences of victory). In all three cases, however, the experience of war served as a means of justifying national claims to power while omitting all reference to the inner make-up of each nation. At the same time, adequate historical assessment of metropolitan public statuary requires that public reception as well as official symbolism and rhetoric be taken into account. Responses to the statues indicate that the widespread popular appeal of national war myths was far from automatically achieved. Instead of fostering cohesion, the reception of cult figures occasionally came up against political controversies that served as factors limiting national propaganda.

Local Life in Working-Class Paris at the end of the Nineteenth Century

This article questions the emphasis that many historians have placed on community and solidarity in nineteenth-century working-class neighborhoods, and the associated idea that these values were under-mined by improved housing, social welfare systems, urban transit, and growing links with the outside world. Taking late nineteenth-century Paris as a case study, it shows that working-class neighborhoods always contained strong internal tensions and that forced proximity did not necessarily create solidarity. Far from being communitarian in outlook, people had a strong sense of private life and of boundaries. Poverty and unstable employment made residential and daily mobility so high, well before mass transit arrived, that attachment to a single neighborhood was impossible. Neighborhood solidarities did exist, but they were only one small aspect of urban life.

GENDER IN MODERN EUROPE: CRIME AND VIRTUE Gender and crime in modern Europe. Edited by Margaret L. Arnot and Cornelie Usborne. London: UCL Press, 1999. Pp. xv+288. ISBN 1-85728-746-0. £14.99. Breaking the codes: female criminality in fin-de-siècle Paris. By Ann-Louise Shapiro. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. vi+265. ISBN 0-8047-2693-0. £10.95. Reign of virtue: mobilizing gender in Vichy France. By

The past decade has seen a virtual explosion in scholarship about issues of gender in the history of modern Europe. Historians have taken up topics from the fall of Louis XVI during the Revolution to the role of women in fascism to demonstrate the pivotal importance that matters of sexual difference have made in shaping politics, culture, and society in the last centuries. Scholars have realized that interpretations of class dynamics, work relations, collective action, and nations at war, for example, look considerably different and are far more complex when attention is paid to gender. Where the study of women in the past was once relegated to the backwaters, now courses on women's history and gender have taken a permanent place in most university curricula. Histories that include women have moved from ‘her-story’ (crudely, the history of individual women and their accomplishments) to analyses that use gender as an interpretative prism through which to view larger social and political transformations.The three books under review participate in this larger movement toward integrating the perspectives of gender into major issues of European history that have been researched by historians before, but from a standpoint that these authors find lacking. Margaret Arnot and Cornelie Usborne, as editors of a collection of essays on gender and crime, wish to correct some of the assumptions about women and crime that have been ignored by historians who focus mostly on more historically conspicuous male criminals. Ann-Louise Shapiro uses the trials of criminal women in late nineteenth-century Paris as ‘lightning rods’ that illuminate the social, political, and cultural conflicts of the fin-de-siècle.

"The Shadow Only": Shadow and Silhouette in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

This essay argues that in late nineteenth-century Paris a crucial shift occurred in the status of pictorial shadow: vanguard artists began to conceive of shadow as an expressive entity in itself rather than merely an accessory to form. Credited with the ability to reveal the intrinsic essence of things, shadow, particularly as silhouette, offered a means to make visible internal truths rather than outward appearances. Shadow's thematization in art, experimental theater, and other entertainments marked a decisive aesthetic transition, and it also reflected the larger impulse of late nineteenth-century thought to explore the less material aspects of being.

“The Shadow Only”: Shadow and Silhouette in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

This essay argues that in late nineteenth-century Paris a crucial shift occurred in the status of pictorial shadow: vanguard artists began to conceive of shadow as an expressive entity in itself rather than merely an accessory to form. Credited with the ability to reveal the intrinsic essence of things, shadow, particularly as silhouette, offered a means to make visible internal truths rather than outward appearances. Shadow's thematization in art, experimental theater, and other entertainments marked a decisive aesthetic transition, and it also reflected the larger impulse of late nineteenth-century thought to explore the less material aspects of being.