The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris

Description

No city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. Beginning with the 'salon', followed by the hybrid culture of libertinage and the revolutionary hotbeds of working-class districts, it explores the continuities and changes between the pre-modern era and the nineteenth century, when Paris asserted itself as cultural capital of Europe. It goes on to explore how this vision of Paris as a key capital of modernity has shaped contemporary literature. Cover Contents Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Chronology and key references 1 Introduction: The city as book Notes 2 The Marais: ‘Paris’ in the seventeenth century 3 Libertine Paris Paris as tribunal Parisian libertinage Paris, capital of libertine Enlightenment Conclusion Notes 4 The Faubourg Saint-Antoine: epicentre of revolution? An old regime anomaly Ventriloquising the faubourg Dismantling the faubourg Nineteenth-century afterlives Notes 5 Honoré de Balzac’s ‘vision’ of Paris An invisible web Intersecting pathways Notes 6 Circulation in Baudelaire’s Paris Notes 7 The remaking of Paris: Zola and Haussmann Haussmann’s Paris Zola’s Paris The promiscuity of Paris: La Curée The belly of Paris: Le Ventre de Paris A Parisian apartment house: Pot-Bouille Paris’s first department store: Au bonheur des dames Notes 8 Paris-Lesbos: Colette’s haunts Notes 9 Céline and Montmartre: Bohemia and music hall Montmartre and the geography of pleasure Lower Montmartre: cabarets and music halls Upper Montmartre: the avant-garde and Bohemia The inter-war years Céline and Montmartre Notes 10 Surrealist literature and urban crime Getting a feel for the surreal A streetwalking literature Paris, capital of the avant-garde Avant-garde Paris: the first wave City as space of projection and collection The mythology of Paris The labyrinth of chance encounters Aftermath Notes 11 The location of experiment: ‘modernist Paris’ Modernist experiments in migration International Exhibition Notes 12 Banlieue blues The 1980s The 1990s The 2000s Conclusion Notes 13 Paris: city of disappearances Getting out Losing your self Conclusion Notes Guide to further reading Key literary texts (in English translation where appropriate and possible) Critical and historical studies Index