During the second half of the nineteenth century; Paris emerged as the entertainment capital of the world. The sparkling redesigned city fostered a culture of energetic crowd-pleasing and multi-sensory amusements that would apprehend and represent real life as spectacle.Vanessa R. Schwartz examines the explosive popularity of such phenomena as the boulevards; the mass press; public displays of corpses at the morgue; wax museums; panoramas; and early film. Drawing on a wide range of written and visual materials; including private and business archives; and working at the intersections of art history; literature; and cinema studies; Schwartz argues that "spectacular realities" are part of the foundation of modern mass society. She refutes the notion that modern life produced an unending parade of distractions leading to alienation; and instead suggests that crowds gathered not as dislocated spectators but as members of a new kind of crowd; one united in pleasure rather than protest.
#4292945 in eBooks 2010-04-03 2010-04-03File Name: B003FJ64BC
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