Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Sexuality at the Fin de Siècle
"It has come to be widely accepted that "sexuality" as we know it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, This is when Krafft-Ebing asserted that "sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheticism and religion," and Havelock Ellis declared sexuality to be the "central problem of life." Yet however self-evident Ellis's claim about sexuality might seem the act of placing something at the center is the consequence of insistent cultural work that engages with competing views about bodies and indeed about the "life" of society. This volume examines how this work was carried out and what resulted from such efforts."--BOOK JACKET.
The Hysteric's Revenge
Brings into relief a critical relationship between the female mind and body that is essential to understanding the discursive position of the turn-of-the-century woman writer. This book includes novels that confront this mind/body problem through a wide variety of styles and genres that challenge conventional fin-de-siecle notions of femininity.
From the Salon to the Schoolroom
How a nation educates its children tells us much about the values of its people. From the Salon to the Schoolroom examines the emerging secondary school system for girls in nineteenth-century France and uncovers how that system contributed to the fashioning of the French bourgeois woman. Rebecca Rogers explores the variety of schools--religious and lay--that existed for girls and paints portraits of the women who ran them and the girls who attended them. Drawing upon a wide array of public and private sources--school programs, prescriptive literature, inspection reports, diaries, and letters--she reveals the complexity of the female educational experience as the schoolroom gradually replaced...
Precarious Partners
From the recent spate of equine deaths on racetracks to protests demanding the removal of mounted Confederate soldier statues to the success and appeal of War Horse, there is no question that horses still play a role in our lives—though fewer and fewer of us actually interact with them. In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil takes readers back to a time in France when horses were an inescapable part of daily life. This was a time when horse ownership became an attainable dream not just for soldiers but also for middle-class children; when natural historians argued about animal intelligence; when the prevalence of horse beatings led to the first animal protection laws; and when the combined magn...
Violette Noziere
On an August evening in 1933, in a quiet, working-class neighborhood in Paris, eighteen-year-old Violette Nozière gave her mother and father glasses of barbiturate-laced "medication," which she told them had been prescribed by the family doctor; one of her parents died, the other barely survived. Almost immediately Violette’s act of "double parricide" became the most sensational private crime of the French interwar era—discussed and debated so passionately that it was compared to the Dreyfus Affair. Why would the beloved only child of respectable parents do such a thing? To understand the motives behind this crime and the reasons for its extraordinary impact, Sarah Maza delves into the abundant case records, re-creating the daily existence of Parisians whose lives were touched by the affair. This compulsively readable book brilliantly evokes the texture of life in 1930s Paris. It also makes an important argument about French society and culture while proposing new understandings of crime and social class in the years before World War II.
Romantic Catholics
In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amélie and Frédéric Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by...
The Kings of Strength
More than a century ago, the barrel-chested strongman clad in leopard skins, Roman sandals and carrying an oversized barbell was a common performer in fairs, circuses and vaudeville theaters. In 1911, before this phenomenon had disappeared, French gym owner, journalist and athlete Edmond Desbonnet published a colorful history of these mighty performers. Since he knew and interviewed many of these men (and women), Desbonnet was able to put a human face on the strongmen and strongwomen who made their livings by performing spectacular strength stunts for the entertainment of the public. Among these were super-strong athlete Louis Uni, known as Apollon; Eugen Sandow, the mighty Adonis of the sta...
Between Crown and Community
The sixteenth century was an important period of transition in France, in which antagonistic religious beliefs led to prolonged civil wars and a growing state apparatus competed with medieval notions of political authority and the social order. Poitiers, a midsized provincial capital, actively experienced these tensions. Early known as a center of Reformed belief, it became a stronghold of ultra-Catholic sentiment by 1575. In examining sixteenth-century Poitiers, Hilary J. Bernstein argues that civic governments and the French monarchy enjoyed a mutually beneficial and reinforcing relationship rather than an antagonistic one; that disparate urban groups shared a political language for defini...
Childhood in the Promised Land
Childhood in the Promised Land is the first history of France's colonies de vacances, a vast network of summer camps created for working-class children. The colonies originated as a late-nineteenth-century charitable institution, providing rural retreats intended to restore the fragile health of poor urban children. Participation grew steadily throughout the first half of the twentieth century, "trickling up" by the late 1940s to embrace middle-class youth as well. At the heart of the study lie the municipal colonies de vacances, organized by the working-class cities of the Paris red belt. Located in remote villages or along the more inexpensive stretches of the Atlantic coast, the municipal...
