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This book examines the lives of people caught in the dynamics of changing mores, rapid urbanization, and real public health issues in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires. Modernity in the Flesh shows the costs Argentines paid for the establishment of liberal democracy between 1880 and 1910. Modernity raised consciousness of the public good and a commitment to new sciences and a new set of priorities that asserted the precedence of health and security of the social whole. This book shows the ways that the tensions of liberal democracy between individual rights and the social good were tempered by "flesh" and articulated through this word. As the state was pursuing positivist science and government, the flesh held out a type of corrective to the focus on scientific and material progress.
Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities —Germaine de Staël , Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier—Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionalist view of ambition prevailed—that is, ambition as morally wrong unless subsumed into a corporate whole—the new regime was marked by a rising tide of competitive individualism. Greater opportunities for personal advancement, however, were shadowed by lingering doubts about the moral value of ambition. Kete identifies three strategies used to overcome the ethical “burden” of ambition : romantic genius (Staël ), secular vocation (Stendhal), and post-mythic destiny (Cuvier). In each case, success would seem to be driven by forces outside one's control. She concludes by examining the still relevant (and still unresolved) conundrum of the relationship of individual desires to community needs, which she identifies as a defining characteristic of the modern world.
The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented social restructuring that disrupted traditional notions of people and place, country and city, private and public spheres. The break with the old order and the entry into the industrial age was most dramatically played out in France, with the growth of a new urban middle class under the July monarchy and the rebuilding of Paris by Haussmann under the Second Empire. The personal, immediate, and radical effects of these changes produced an altered conception of the meaning of home and a homeland. Focusing primarily on mid-nineteenth-century France, these essays, by noted literary critics, offer fascinating new accounts of the relationship between the social history of home and homelessness and the imaginative expressions of the age. This probing interdisciplinary approach, combining theoretical sophistication with historical detail, addresses the fundamental importance of class and gender to the modern history of homelessness. Its provocative readings of well-known texts provide a model of cultural studies at its best and most serious.
How do people, in both the past and the present, think about moments of social and political crisis, and how do they respond to them? What are the interpretive codes by which troubling events are read and given meaning, and what part do these codes play in suggesting specific strategies for coping with the world? In Past Convictions Courtney Booker attempts to answer these questions by examining the controversial divestiture and public penance of Charlemagne's son, the Emperor Louis the Pious, in 833. Historians have customarily viewed the event as marking the beginning of the end of the Carolingian dynasty. Exploring how both contemporaries and subsequent generations thought about Louis's f...
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's "marvelous" (Jane Goodall) New York Times bestseller, When Elephants Weep, made us re-evaluate the emotional lives of animals. And in his follow-up New York Times bestseller, Dogs Never Lie About Love, Masson reflected with "intelligence and originality" (Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review) on the emotional world of dogs. Now, in The Emperor's Embrace, Masson offers a remarkable look at one of the most fulfilling roles in the animal world: fatherhood. With fascinating insight, impeccable research, and captivating writing, controversial psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, a new father himself, introduces us to the world's best dads. He takes us to such places as Antarc...
This textbook provides authoritative and up-to-date coverage of the classification, causes, treatment and prevention of psychological disorders in children.
This book studies the various definitions of animal nature proposed by nineteenth-century currents of thought in France. It is based on an examination of a number of key thinkers and writers, some well known (for example, Michelet and Lamartine), others largely forgotten (for example, Gleizes and Reynaud). At the centre of the book lies the idea that knowledge of animals is often knowledge of something else, that the primary referentiality is overlaid with additional levels of meaning. In nineteenth-century France thinking about animals (their future and their past) became a way of thinking about power relations in society, for example about the status of women and the problem of the labouring classes. This book analyses how animals as symbols externalize and mythologize human fears and wishes, but it also demonstrates that animals have an existence in and for themselves and are not simply useful counters functioning within discourse.
'Absorbing' - Guardian 'Arnold-Forster is a shrewd critic and delightful guide . . . She carries weighty learning lightly – embracing everything relevant, from dubious neuroscience to cod sociology.' - The Telegraph In Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from its first identification in seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illness that could, quite literally, kill you) to the present day (when it is co-opted by advertising agencies and politicians alike to sell us goods and policies). Nostalgia is a social and political emoti...